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SOCIALISM 

UTOPIAN   AND  SCIENTIFIC 


SOCIALISM 

UTOPIAN  AND  SCIENTIFIC 

BY 

FREDERICK  ENGELS 


TRANSLATED  BY  EDWARD  A  VELING 

D.Sc,  Fellow  of  University    "  "-'^e,  London 

t 


WITH  A  SPECIAL  INTRODUCTION   BY  THE  AUTHOR 


CHICAGO 
CHARLES  H.  KERR  &  COMPANY 

1914 


JOHN    F.  HIGGINS 

PRINTKR  AND  BINDER 


376-382    MONROE  STREET 
CHICAGO.     ILLINOIS 


PUBLISHER'S  NOTE      /  c,  / .  / 

Socialism,  Utopian  and  Scientific  needs  no 
preface.  It  ranks  with  the  Communist  Manifesto 
as  one  of  the  indispensable  books  for  any  one  de- 
siring to  understand  the  modern  socialist  move- 
ment. It  has  been  translated  into  every  language 
where  capitalism  prevails,  and  its  circulation  is 
more  rapid  than  ever  before. 

In  1900,  when  our  publishing  house  had  just 
oegun  the  circulation  of  socialist  books,  we 
brought  out  the  first  American  reprint  of  the 
authorized  translation  of  this  work.  The  many 
editions  required  by  the  growing  demand  have 
worn  out  the  plates,  and  we  are  now  reprint- 
ing it  in  more  attractive  form. 

It  will  be  observed  that  the  author  in  his  in- 
troduction says  that  from  1883  to  1892,  20,000 
copies  of  the  book  were  sold  in  Germany.  Our 
own  sales  of  the  book  in  America  from  1900  to 
1908  were  not  less  than  30,000. 

Last  year  we  published  the  first  English  ver- 
sion of  the  larger  work  to  which  the  author 
refers  in  the  opening  page  of  his  introduction. 
The  translation  is  by  Austin  Lewis,  and  bears 

7 


I3(i8;^ij 


8 


PUBLISHERS   NOTE 


the  title  "  Landmarks  of  Scientific  Socialism " 
(cloth,  $i.oo).  It  includes  the  greater  portion  of 
ths  original  work,  omitting  what  is  presented 
here,  and  also  some  of  the  personalities  due  to 
the  heat  of  controversy. 

Frederick  Engels  is  second  only  to  Karl  Marx 
among  socialist  writers,  and  his  influence  in  the 
United  States  is  only  beginning. 

C.  H.  K. 

June,  1908. 


INTRODUCTION 

The  present  little  book  is,  originally,  a  part  of  a 
larger  whole.  About  1875,  Dr.  E.  Dühnng,/>ri- 
vatdoceyit  at  Berlin  University,  suddenly  and 
rather  clamorously  announced  his  conversion  to 
Socialism,  and  presented  the  German  public  not 
only  w^ith  an  elaborate  Socialist  theory,  but  also 
with  a  complete  practical  plan  for  the  reorganiza- 
tion of  society.  As  a  matter  of  course,  he  fell 
foul  of  his  predecessors;  above  all,  he  honored 
Marx  by  pouring  out  upon  him  the  full  vials  of 
his  wrath. 

This  took  place  about  the  time  when  the  two 
sections  of  the  Socialist  party  in  Germany  — 
Eisenachers  and  Lassallians  —  had  just  effected 
their  fusion,  and  thus  obtained  not  only  an  im- 
mense increase  of  strength,  but,  what  was  more, 
the  faculty  of  employing  the  whole  of  this 
strength  against  the  common  enemy.  The  So- 
cialist party  in  Germany  was  fast  becoming  a 
power.  But  to  make  it  a  power,  the  first  condi- 
tion was  that  the  newly-conquered  unity  should 
not  be  imperiled.  And  Dr.  Duhring  openly  pro- 
ceeded to  form  around  himself  a  sect,  the  nucleus 


lO  INTRODUCTION 

of  a  future  separate  party.  It  thus  became  nec- 
essary to  take  up  the  gauntlet  thrown  down  to 
us,  and  to  fight  out  the  struggle  whether  we  liked 
it  or  not. 

This,  however,  though  it  might  not  be  an  over 
difficult,  was  evidently  a  long-winded,  business. 
As  is  well  known,  we  Germans  are  of  a  terribly 
ponderous  Gründlichkeit,  radical  profundity  or 
profound  radicality,  whatever  you  may  like  to 
call  it.  Whenever  anyone  of  us  expounds  what 
he  considers  a  new  doctrine,  he  has  first  to  elab- 
orate it  into  an  all-comprising  system.  He  has 
to  prove  that  both  the  first  principles  of 
logic  and  the  fundamental  laws  of  the  universe 
had  existed  from  all  eternity  for  no  other  pur- 
pose than  to  ultimately  lead  to  this  newly-discov- 
ered, crowning  theory.  And  Dr.  Diihring,  in  this 
respect,  was  quite  up  to  the  national  mark.  Noth- 
ing less  than  a  complete  "  System  of  Philosophy," 
mental,  moral,  natural,  and  historical ;  a  complete 
"  System  of  Political  Economy  and  Socialism  " ; 
and,  finally,  a  "  Critical  History  of  Political  Econ- 
omy " —  three  big  volumes  in  octavo,  heavy  ex- 
trinsically  and  intrinsically,  three  army-corps  of 
arguments  mobilized  against  all  previous  philoso- 
phers and  economists  in  general,  and  against 
Marx  in  particular  —  in  fact,  an  attempt  at  a  com- 
plete "revolution  in  science" — these  were  what 
I  should  have  to  tackle.  I  had  to  treat  of  all  and 
every  possible  subject,  from  the  concepts  of  time 
and  space  to   Bimetallism ;   from  the   eternity  of 


INTRODUCTION  1 1 

matter  and  motion  to  the  perishable  nature  of 
moral  ideas ;  from  Darwin's  natural  selection  to 
the  education  of  youth  in  a  future  society.  Any- 
how, the  systematic  comprehensiveness  of  my 
opponent  gave  me  the  opportunity  of  developing, 
in  opposition  to  him,  and  in  a  more  connected 
form  than  had  previously  been  done,  the  views 
held  by  Marx  and  myself  on  this  great  variety  of 
subjects.  And  that  was  the  principal  reason 
which  made  me  undertake  this  otherwise  ungrate- 
ful task. 

My  reply  was  first  published  in  a  series  of  arti- 
cles in  the  Leipzig  "  Vorwärts,"  the  chief  organ 
of  the  Socialist  party,  and  later  on  as  a  book: 
"  Herrn  Eugen  Dühring's  Umwälzung  der  Wis- 
senschaft "  (Mr.  E.  Dühring's  "Revolution  in 
Science"),  a  second  edition  of  which  appeared 
in  Zürich,  1886. 

At  the  request  of  my  friend,  Paul  Lafargue, 
now  representative  of  Lille  in  the  French  Cham- 
ber of  Deputies,  I  arranged  three  chapters  of  this 
book  as  a  pamphlet,  which  he  translated  and  pub- 
lished in  1880,  under  the  title:  " Socialisme 
titopiqtie  et  Socialisme  scientißquc."  From  this 
French  text  a  Polish  and  a  Spanish  edition  were 
prepared.  In  1883,  our  German  friends  brought 
out  the  pamphlet  in  the  original  language.  Ital- 
ian, Russian,  Danish,  Dutch,  and  Roumanian 
translations,  based  upon  the  German  text,  have 
since  been  published.  Thus,  witli  the  present 
English  edition,  this  little  book  circulates  in  ten 


12  INTRODUCTION 

languages.  I  am  not  aware  that  any  other  Social- 
ist work,  not  even  our  "  Communist  Manifesto  " 
of  1848  or  Marx's  "  Capital,"  has  been  so  often 
translated.  In  Germany  it  has  had  four  editions 
of  about  20,000  copies  in  all. 

The  economic  terms  used  in  this  work,  as  far  as 
they  are  new,  agree  with  those  used  in  the  English 
edition  of  Marx's  "  Capital."  We  call  "  produc- 
tion of  commodities  "  that  economic  phase  where 
articles  are  produced  not  only  for  the  use  of  the 
producers,  but  also  for  purposes  of  exchange; 
that  is,  as  commodities,  not  as  use-values.  This 
phase  extends  from  the  first  beginnings  of  produc- 
tion for  exchange  down  to  our  present  time;  it 
attains  its  full  development  under  capitalist  pro- 
duction only,  that  is,  under  conditions  where  the 
capitalist,  the  owner  of  the  means  of  production, 
employs,  for  wages,  laborers,  people  deprived  of 
all  means  of  production  except  their  own  labor- 
power,  and  pockets  the  excess  of  the  selling  price 
of  the  products  over  his  outlay.  We  divide  the 
history  of  industrial  production  since  the  Middle 
Ages  into  three  periods:  (i)  handicraft,  small 
master  craftsmen  with  a  few  journeymen  and  ap- 
prentices, where  each  laborer  produces  the  com- 
plete article;  (2)  manufacture,  where  greater 
numbers  of  workmen,  grouped  in  one  large  es- 
tablishment, produce  the  complete  article  on  the 
principle  of  division  of  labor,  each  workman  per- 
forming only  one  partial  operation,  so  that  the 
product  is  complete  only  after  having  passed  sue- 


INTRODUCTION  Iß 

cessively  through  the  hands  of  all;  (3)  modern 
industry,  where  the  product  is  produced  by  ma- 
chinery driven  by  power,  and  where  the  work  of 
the  laborer  is  limited  to  superintending  and  cor- 
recting the  performances  of  the  mechanical 
agent. 

I  am  perfectly  aware  that  the  contents  of  this 
work  will  meet  with  objection  from  a  consider- 
able portion  of  the  British  public.  But  if  we 
Continentals  had  taken  the  slightest  notice  of 
the  prejudices  of  British  "  respectability,"  we 
should  be  even  worse  off  than  we  are.  This 
book  defends  what  we  call  "  historical  mate- 
rialism," and  the  word  materialism  grates  upon 
the  ears  of  the  immense  majority  of  British 
readers.  "  Agnosticism  "  might  be  tolerated,  but 
materialism  is  utterly  inadmissible. 

And  yet  the  original  home  of  all  modern  mate- 
rialism, from  the  seventeenth  century  onwards, 
is  England. 

"  Materialism  is  the  natural-born  son  of  Great 
Britain.  Already  the  British  schoolman.  Duns 
Scotus,  asked,  '  whether  it  was  impossible  for 
matter  to  think?  ' 

"  In  order  to  effect  this  miracle,  he  took  refuge 
in  God's  omnipotence,  i.e.,  he  made  theology 
preach  materialism.  Moreover,  he  was  a  nomi- 
nalist. Nominalism,  the  first  form  of  materialism, 
is  chiefly  found  among  the  English  schoolmen. 

"  The  real  progenitor  of  English  materialism  is 
Bacon.     To  him  natural  philosophy  is  the  only 


14  INTRODUCTION 

true  philosophy,  and  physics  based  upon  the  ex- 
perience of  the  senses  is  the  chiefest  part  of 
natural  philosophy.  Anaxagoras  and  his  homoi- 
omeriie,  Democritus  and  his  atoms,  he  often 
quotes  as  his  authorities.  According  to  him  the 
senses  are  infallible  and  the  source  of  all  knowl- 
edge. All  science  is  based  on  experience,  and 
consists  in  subjecting  the  data  furnished  by  the 
senses  to  a  rational  method  of  investigation.  In- 
duction, analysis,  comparison,  observation,  ex- 
periment, are  the  principal  forms  of  such  a  ra- 
tional method.  Among  the  qualities  inherent 
in  matter,  motion  is  the  first  and  foremost,  not 
only  in  the  form  of  mechanical  and  mathematical 
motion,  but  chiefly  in  the  form  of  an  impulse,  a 
vital  spirit,  a  tension  —  or  a  '  qual,'  to  use  a 
term  of  Jacob  Böhme's  ^ —  of  matter. 

"  In  Bacon,  its  first  creator,  materialism  still 
occludes  within  itself  the  germs  of  a  many-sided 
development.  On  the  one  hand,  matter,  sur- 
rounded by  a  sensuous,  poetic  glamour,  seems  to 
attract  man's  whole  entity  by  v/inning  smiles. 
On  the  other,  the  aphoristically  formulated  doc- 
trine pullulates  with  inconsistencies  imported 
from  theology. 

*  "  Qual  "  is  a  philosophical  play  upon  words.  Qual  liter- 
ally means  torture,  a  pain  which  drives  to  action  of  some 
kind;  at  the  same  time  the  mystic  IJolime  puts  into  the  Ger- 
man word  something  of  the  meaning  of  the  Latin  qualitas; 
his  "  qual  "  was  the  activating  principle  arising  from,  and 
promoting  in  its  turn,  the  sjiontancous  development  of  the 
thing,  relation,  or  person  subject  to  it,  in  contradistinction  to 
a  pain  inflicted   from  without. 


INTRODUCTION  1 5 

"  In  its  further  evolution,  materialism  becomes 
one-sided.  Hobbes  is  the  man  who  systematizes 
Baconian  materiahsm.  Knowledge  based  upon 
the  senses  loses  its  poetic  blossom,  it  passes  into 
the  abstract  experience  of  the  mathematician; 
geometry  is  proclaimed  as  the  queen  of  sciences. 
Materialism  takes  to  misanthropy.  If  it  is  to 
overcome  its  opponent,  misanthropic,  fleshless 
spiritualism,  and  that  on  the  latter's  own  ground, 
materialism  has  to  chastise  its  own  flesh  and 
turn  ascetic.  Thus,  from  a  sensual,  it  passes  into 
an  intellectual,  entity ;  but  thus,  too,  it  evolves 
all  the  consistency,  regardless  of  consequences, 
characteristic  of  the  intellect. 

"Hobbes,  as  Bacon's  continuator,  argues  thus: 
if  all  human  knowledge  is  furnished  by  the  senses, 
then  our  concepts  and  ideas  are  but  the  phan- 
foms,  divested  of  their  sensual  forms,  of  the  real 
world.  Philosophy  can  but  give  names  to  these 
phantoms.  One  name  may  be  applied  to  more 
than  one  of  them.  There  may  even  be  names  of 
names.  It  would  imply  a  contradiction  if,  on  the 
one  hand,  we  maintained  that  all  ideas  had  their 
origin  in  the  world  of  sensation,  and,  on  the 
other,  that  a  word  was  more  than  a  word ;  that 
besides  the  beings  known  to  us  by  our  senses, 
beings  which  are  one  and  all  individuals,  there 
existed  also  beings  of  a  general,  not  individual, 
nature.  An  unbodily  substance  is  the  same  ab- 
surdity as  an  unbodily  body.  Body,  being,  sub- 
stance,   are    but    different    terms    for    the    same 


1 6  INTRODUCTION 

reality.  It  u  impossible  to  separate  thought  from 
tnatter  that  thinks.  This  matter  is  the  substratum 
of  all  changes  going  on  in  the  world.  The  word 
infinite  is  meaningless,  unless  it  states  that  our 
mind  is  capable  of  performing  an  endless  process 
of  addition.  Only  material  things  being  per- 
ceptible to  us,  we  cannot  know  anything  about 
the  existence  of  God.  My  own  existence  alone 
is  certain.  Every  human  passion  is  a  mechanical 
movement  which  has  a  beginning  and  an  end. 
The  objects  of  impulse  are  what  we  call  good. 
Man  is  subject  to  the  same  laws  as  nature. 
Power  and  freedom  are  identical. 

"  Hobbes  had  systematized  Bacon,  without, 
however,  furnishing  a  proof  for  Bacon's  funda- 
mental principle,  the  origin  of  all  human  knowl- 
edge from  the  world  of  sensation.  It  was  Locke 
who,  in  his  Essay  on  the  Human  Understanding, 
supplied  this  proof. 

"Hobbes  had  shattered  the  theistic  prejudices 
of  Baconian  materialism;  Collins,  Dodwall, 
Coward,  Hartley,  Priestley  similarly  shattered  the 
last  theological  bars  that  still  hemmed-in  Locke's 
sensationalism.  At  all  events,  for  practical  ma- 
terialists, Theism  is  but  an  easy-going  way  of 
getting  rid  of  religion."  ^ 

Thus  Karl  Marx  wrote  about  the  British  origin 
of  modern  materialism.  If  Englishmen  nowa- 
days  do   not   exactly   relish   the   compliment   he 

^  Marx  and  Engels,  "  Die  Heilige  Familie,"  Frankfurt  a. 
M.   1845,   pp.   201-204. 


INTRODUCTION  ■  I7 

paid  their  ancestors,  more's  the  pity.  It  is  none 
the  less  undeniable  that  Bacon,  Hobbes,  and 
Locke  are  the  fathers  of  that  brilliant  school  of 
French  materialists  which  made  the  eighteenth 
century,  in  spite  of  all  battles  on  land  and  sea 
won  over  Frenchmen  by  Germans  and  English- 
men, a  pre-eminently  French  century,  even  be- 
fore that  crowning  French  Revolution,  the  results 
of  which  we  outsiders,  in  England  as  well  as  in 
Germany,  are  still  trying  to  acclimatize. 

There  is  no  denying  it.  About  the  middle  of 
this  century,  what  struck  every  cultivated  for- 
eigner who  set  up  his  residence  in  England,  was, 
what  he  was  then  bound  to  consider  the  religious 
bigotry  and  stupidity  of  the  English  respectable 
middle-class.  We,  at  that  time,  were  all  mate- 
rialists, or,  at  least,  very  advanced  freethinkers, 
and  to  us  it  appeared  inconceivable  that  almost 
all  educated  people  in  England  should  believe  in 
all  sorts  of  impossible  miracles,  and  that  even 
geologists  like  Buckland  and  Mantell  should  con- 
tort the  facts  of  their  science  so  as  not  to  clash 
too  much  with  the  myths  of  the  book  of  Genesis ; 
while,  in  order  to  find  people  who  dared  to  use 
their  own  intellectual  faculties  with  regard  to 
religious  matters,  you  had  to  go  amongst  the  un- 
educated, the  "  great  unwashed,"  as  they  were 
then  called,  the  working  people,  especially  the 
Owenite  Socialists. 

But  England  has  been  "  civilized  "  since  then. 
The  exhibition  of  185 1  sounded  the  knell  of  Eng- 


l8  INTRODUCTION 

lish  insular  exclusiveness.  England  became  grad- 
ually internationalized,  in  diet,  in  manners,  in 
ideas ;  so  much  so  that  I  begin  to  wish  that  some 
English  manners  and  customs  had  made  as  much 
headway  on  the  Continent  as  other  continental 
habits  have  made  here.  Anyhow,  the  introduc- 
tion and  spread  of  salad-oil  (before  1851  known 
only  to  the  aristocracy)  has  been  accompanied  by 
a  fatal  spread  of  continental  scepticism  in  mat- 
ters religious,  and  it  has  come  to  this,  that  ag- 
nosticism, though  not  yet  considered  "  the  thing  " 
quite  as  much  as  the  Church  of  England,  is  yet 
very  nearly  on  a  par,  as  far  as  respectability 
goes,  with  Baptism,  and  decidedly  ranks  above 
the  Salvation  Army.  And  I  cannot  help  be- 
lieving that  under  these  circumstances  it  will  be 
consoling  to  many  who  sincerely  regret  and  con- 
demn this  progress  of  infidelity,  to  learn  that 
these  "  new-fangled  notions  "  are  not  of  foreign 
origin,  are  not  "  made  in  Germany,"  like  so  many 
other  articles  of  daily  use,  but  are  undoubtedly 
Old  English,  and  that  their  British  originators 
two  hundred  years  ago  went  a  good  deal  further 
than  their  descendants  now  dare  to  venture. 

What,  indeed,  is  agnosticism,  but.  to  use  an 
expressive  Lancashire  term,  "  shamefaced  "  ma- 
terialism? The  agnostic's  conception  of  Nature 
is  materialistic  throughout.  The  entire  natural 
world  is  governed  by  law,  and  absolutely  excludes 
the  intervention  of  action  from  without.  But, 
he  adds,  we  have  no  means  either  of  ascertaining 


INTRODUCTION  IQ 

or  of  disproving  the  existence  of  some  Supreme 
Being  beyond  the  known  universe.  Now,  this 
might  hold  good  at  the  time  when  Laplace,  to 
Napoleon's  question,  why  in  the  great  astron- 
omer's Mccaniquc  celeste  the  Creator  was  not 
even  mentioned,  proudly  replied :  Jc  n'avais  pas 
besoin  de  cette  hypothcse.  But  nowadays,  in  our 
evolutionary  conception  of  the  universe,  there  is 
absolutely  no  room  for  either  a  Creator  or  a 
Ruler;  and  to  talk  of  a  Supreme  Being  shut  out 
from  the  whole  existing  world,  implies  a  con- 
tradiction in  terms,  and,  as  it  seems  to  me,  a 
gratuitous  insult  to  the  feelings  of  religious  peo- 
ple. 

Again,  our  agnostic  admits  that  all  our  knowl- 
edge is  based  upon  the  information  imparted  to 
us  by  our  senses.  But,  he  adds,  how  do  we  know 
that  our  senses  give  us  correct  representations  of 
the  objects  we  perceive  through  them?  And  he 
proceeds  to  inform  us  that,  whenever  he  speaks 
of  objects  or  their  qualities,  he  does  in  reality 
not  mean  these  objects  and  qualities,  of  which  he 
cannot  know  anything  for  certain,  but  merely 
the  impressions  which  they  have  produced  on 
his  senses.  Now,  this  line  of  reasoning  seems 
undoubtedly  hard  to  beat  by  mere  argumentation. 
But  before  there  was  argumentation,  there  was 
action.  Im  Anfang  war  die  That.  And  human 
action  had  solved  the  difficulty  long  before  human 
ingenuity  invented  it.  The  proof  of  the  pudding 
is  in  the  eatinsf.     From  the  moment  we  turn  to 


20  INTRODUCTION 

our  own  use  these  objects,  according  to  the  qual- 
ities we  perceive  in  them,  we  put  to  an  infallible 
test  the  correctness  or  otherwise  of  our  sense- 
perceptions.  If  these  perceptions  have  been 
wrong,  then  our  estimate  of  the  use  to  which  an 
object  can  be  turned  must  also  be  wrong,  and  our 
attempt  must  fail.  But  if  we  succeed  in  accom- 
plishing our  aim,  if  we  find  that  the  object  does 
agree  with  our  idea  of  it,  and  does  answer  the 
purpose  we  intended  it  for,  then  that  is  positive 
proof  that  our  perceptions  of  it  and  of  its  qual- 
ities, so  far,  agree  with  reality  outside  ourselves. 
And  whenever  we  find  ourselves  face  to  face  with 
a  failure,  then  we  generally  are  not  long  in  mak- 
ing out  the  cause  that  made  us  fail ;  we  find  that 
the  perception  upon  which  we  acted  was  either 
incomplete  and  superficial,  or  combined  with  the 
results  of  other  perceptions  in  a  way  not  war- 
ranted by  them  —  what  we  call  defective  reason- 
ing. So  long  as  we  take  care  to  train  and  to  use 
our  senses  properly,  and  to  keep  our  action  within 
the  limits  prescribed  by  perceptions  properly 
made  and  properly  used,  so  long  we  shall  find 
that  the  result  of  our  action  proves  the  con- 
formity of  our  perceptions  with  the  objective 
nature  of  the  things  perceived.  Not  in  one  sin- 
gle instance,  so  far,  have  we  been  led  to  the  con- 
clusion that  our  sense-perceptions,  scientifically 
controlled,  induce  in  our  minds  ideas  respecting 
the  outer  world  that  are,  by  their  very  nature, 
at  variance  with  reality,  or  that  there  is  an  in- 


INTRODUCTION  21 

herent   incompatÜMlity  between   the  outer   world 
and  our  sense-perceptions  of  it. 

But  then  come  the  Neo-Kantian  agnostics  and 
say:  We  may  correctly  perceive  the  quahties  of 
a  thing,  but  we  cannot  by  any  sensible  or  mental 
process  grasp  the  thing  in  itself.  This  "  thing 
in  itself "  is  beyond  our  ken.  To  this  Hegel, 
long  since,  has  replied:  If  you  know  all  the 
qualities  of  a  thing,  you  know  the  thing  itself; 
nothing  remains  but  the  fact  that  the  said  thing 
exists  without  us ;  and  when  your  senses  have 
taught  you  that  fact,  you  have  grasped  the  last 
remnant  of  the  thing  in  itself,  Kant's  celebrated 
unknowable  Ding  an  sich.  To  which  it  may  be 
added,  that  in  Kant's  time  our  knowledge  of  nat- 
ural objects  was  indeed  so  fragmentary  that  he 
might  well  suspect,  behind  the  little  we  knew 
about  each  of  them,  a  mysterious  "  thing  in 
itself."  But  one  after  another  these  ungraspable 
things  have  been  grasped,  analyzed,  and,  what 
is  more,  reproduced  by  the  giant  progress  of 
science ;  and  what  we  can  produce,  we  certainly 
cannot  consider  as  unknowable.  To  the  chem- 
istry of  the  first  iialf  of  this  century  organic 
substances  were  such  mysterious  objects;  now, 
we  learn  to  build  them  up  one  after  another  from  .; 
their  chemical  elements  without  the  aid  of  or-  ^ 
ganic  processes.  Modern  chemists  declare  that 
as  soon  as  the  chemical  constitution  of  no  mat- 
ter what  body  is  known,  it  can  be  built  up  from 
its  elements.     We  are  still  far  from  knowing  the 


22  INTRODUCTION 

constitution  of  the  highest  organic  substances, 
the  albuminous  bodies ;  but  there  is  no  reason 
why  we  should  not,  if  only  after  centuries,  ar- 
rive at  that  knowledge  and,  armed  with  it,  pro- 
duce artificial  albumen.  But  if  we  arrive  at  that, 
we  shall  at  the  same  time  have  produced  organic 
life,  for  life,  from  its  lowest  to  its  highest  forms, 
is  but  the  normal  mode  of  existence  of  albuminous 
bodies. 

.  As  soon,  however,  as  our  agnostic  has  made 
these  formal  mental  reservations,  he  talks  and 
acts  as  the  rank  materialist  he  at  bottom  is.  He 
may  say  that,  as  far  as  we  know,  matter  and 
motion,  or  as  it  is  now  called,  energy,  can 
neither  be  created  nor  destroyed,  but  that  we 
have  no  proof  of  their  not  having  been  created 
at  some  time  or  other.  But  if  you  try  to  use 
this  admission  against  him  in  any  particular  case, 
he  will  quickly  put  you  out  of  court.  If  he 
admits  the  possibility  of  spiritualism  in  abstracto, 
he  will  have  none  of  it  in  concreto.  As  far  as 
we  know  and  can  know,  he  will  tell  you  there 
is  no  Creator  and  no  Ruler  of  the  universe ;  as 
far  as  we  are  concerned,  matter  and  energy  can 
neither  be  created  nor  annihilated;  for  us,  mind 
is  a  mode  of  energy,  a  function  of  the  brain; 
all  we  know  is  that  the  material  world  is  gov- 
erned by  immutable  laws,  and  so  forth.  Thus, 
as  far  as  he  is  a  scientific  man,  as  far  as  he 
knozvs  anything,  he  is  a  materialist ;  outside  his 
science,  in  spheres  about  which  he  knows  nothing, 


INTRODUCTION  23 

he  translates  his  ignorance  into  Greek  and  calls 
it  agnosticism. 

At  all  events,  one  thing  seems  clear :  even  if  I 
was  an  agnostic,  it  is  evident  that  I  could  not 
describe  the  conception  of  history  sketched  out 
in  this  little  book,  as  "  historical  agnosticism." 
Religious  people  would  laugh  at  me,  agnostics 
would  indignantly  ask,  was  I  going  to  make  fun 
of  them?  And  thus  I  hope  even  British  re- 
spectability will  not  be  overshocked  if  I  use,  in 
English  as  well  as  in  so  many  other  languages, 
the  term,  "  historical  materialism,"  to  designate 
that  view  of  the  course  of  history,  which  seeks 
the  ultimate  cause  and  the  great  moving  power 
of  all  important  historic  events  in  the  economic 
development  of  society,  in  the  changes  in  the 
modes  of  production  and  exchange,  in  the  con- 
sequent division  of  society  into  distinct  classes, 
and  in  the  struggles  of  these  classes  against  one 
another. 

This  indulgence  will  perhaps  be  accorded  to 
me  all  the  sooner  if  I  show  that  historical  ma- 
terialism may  be  of  advantage  even  to  British 
respectability.  I  have  mentioned  the  fact,  that 
about  forty  or  fifty  years  ago,  any  cultivated 
foreigner  settling  in  England  was  struck  by  what 
he  was  then  bound  to  consider  the  religious  big- 
otry and  stupidity  of  tlie  English  respectable 
middle-class.  I  am  now  going  to  prove  that  the 
respectal)le  English  middle-class  of  that  time  was 
not  quite  as  stupid  as  it  looked  to  the  intelligent 


24  INTRODUCTION 

foreigner.     Its    religious    leanings    can    be    ex- 
plained. 

When  Europe  emerged  from  the  Middle  Ages, 
the  rising  middle-class  of  the  towns  constituted 
its    revolutionary   element.     It   had    conquered   a 
recognized   position   within   medijeval   feudal   or- 
ganization, but  this  position,  also,  had  become  too 
narrow   for   its   expansive   power.     The   develop- 
ment of  the  middle-class,  the  bourgeoisie,  became 
incompatible  with  the  maintenance  of  the  feudal 
system ;  the  feudal  system,  therefore,  had  to  fall. 
But  the  great  international  center  of  feudalism 
\    was  the  Roman  Catholic  Church.     It  united  the 
whole   of    feudalized   Western   Europe,    in   spite 
of  all  internal  wars,  into  one  grand  political  sys- 
tem, opposed  as  much  to  the  schismatic  Greeks 
/  as  to  the  Mohammedian  countries.     It  surrounded 
/     feudal  institutions  with  the  halo  of  divine  con- 
\     secration.     It   had   organized   its   own   hierarchy 
■    on  the  feudal  model,  and,  lastly,  it  was  itself  by 
far  the  most  powerful  feudal  lord,  holding,  as  it 
;  did,   fully   one-third   of  the   soil   of  the   Catholic 
world.     Before  profane  feudalism  could  be  suc- 
cessively attacked  in  each  country  and  in  detail, 
this,   its   sacred   central   organization,   had   to  be 
destroyed. 

Moreover,  parallel  with  the  rise  of  the  middle- 
class  went  on  the  great  revival  of  science;  as- 
tronomy, mechanics,  physics,  anatomy,  physiol- 
ogy, were  again  cultivated.  And  the  bourgeoisie, 
for  the  development  of  its  industrial  production, 


INTRODUCTION  25 

required   a   science   which   ascertained   the   phys- 
ical properties  of  natural  objects  and  the  modes 
of  action  of  the  forces  of  Nature.     Now  up  to   . 
then  science  had  but  been  the  humble  handmaid     ' 
of  the  Church,  had  not  been  allowed  to  overstep      > 
\h.e.  limits  set  by  faith,  and  for  that  reason  had 
been  no  science  at  all.     Science  rebelled  against  \ 
the  Church ;  the  bourgeoisie  could  not  do  with-    \ 
out  science,   and,  therefore,  had  to  join   in.  the  / 
rebellion. 

The  above,  though  touching  but  two  of  the 
points  where  the  rising  middle-class  was  bound 
to  come  into  collision  with  the  established  re- 
ligion, will  be  sufficient  to  show,  first,  that  the 
class  most  directly  interested  in  the  struggle 
against  the  pretensions  of  the  Roman  Church  . 
was  the  bourgeoisie;  and  second,  that  every  \ 
struggle  against  feudalism,  at  that  time,  had  to 
take  on  a  religious  disguise,  had  to  be  directed 
against  the  Church  in  the  first  instance.  But  if' 
the  universities  and  the  traders  of  the  cities 
started  the  cry,  it  was  sure  to  find,  and  did  find, 
^  strong  echo  in  the  masses  of  the  country  peo- 
ple, the  peasants,  who  everywhere  had  to  strug- 
gle for  their  very  existence  with  their  feudal 
lords,  spiritual  and  temporal. 

The  long  fight  of  the  bourgeoisie  against  feu- 
dalism culminated  in  three  great,  decisive  bat- 
tles. 

The  first  was  what  is  called  the  Protestant 
Reformation   in   Germany.     The   war-cry    raised 


26  INTRODUCTION 

against  the  Church  by  Luther  was  responded  to 
by  two  insurrections  of  a  political  nature:  first, 
that  of  the  lower  nobility  under  Franz  von 
Sickingen  (1523),  then  the  great  Peasants'  War, 
1525.  Both  were  defeated,  chiefly  in  consequence 
of  the  indecision  of  the  parties  most  interested, 
the  burghers  of  the  towns  —  an  indecision  into 
the  causes  of  which  we  cannot  here  enter.  From 
that  moment  the  struggle  degenerated  into  a 
fight  between  the  local  princes  and  the  central 
power,  and  ended  by  blotting  out  Germany,  for 
two  hundred  years,  from  the  politically  active 
nations  of  Europe.  The  Lutheran  reformation 
produced  a  new  creed  indeed,  a  religion  adapted 
to  absolute  monarchy.  No  sooner  were  the 
peasants  of  North-east  Germany  converted  to 
Lutheranism  than  they  were  from  freemen  re- 
duced to  serfs. 

But  where  Luther  failed,  Calvin  won  the  day. 
Calvin's  creed  was  one  fit  for  the  boldest  of  the 
bourgeoisie  of  his  time.  His  predestination  doc- 
trine was  the  religious  expression  of  the  fact 
that  in  the  commercial  world  of  competition  suc- 
cess or  failure  does  not  depend  upon  a  man's 
activity  or  cleverness,  but  upon  circumstances 
uncontrollable  by  him.  It  is  not  of  him  that 
willeth  or  of  him  that  runneth,  but  of  the  mercy 
of  unknown  superior  economic  powers ;  and  this 
was  especially  true  at  a  period  of  economic  rev- 
olution, when  all  old  commercial  routes  and  cen- 
ters were  replaced  by  new  ones,  when  India  and 


INTRODUCTION  2^ 

America  were  opened  to  the  world,  and  when 
even  the  most  sacred  economic  articles  of  faith 
—  the  value  of  gold  and  silver  —  began  to  totter 
and  to  break  down.  Calvin's  church  constitution 
was  thoroughly,  democratic  and  republican ;  and 
where  the  kingdom  of  God  was  republicanized, 
could  the  kingdoms  of  this  world  remain  subject 
to  monarchs,  bishops,  and  lords  ?  While  Ger- 
man Lutheranism  became  a  willing  tool  in  the 
hands  of  princes,  Calvinism  founded  a  republic 
in  Holland,  and  active  republican  parties  in  Eng- 
land, and,  above  all,  Scotland. 

In  Calvinism,  the  second  great  bourgeois  up- 
heaval found  its  doctrine  ready  cut  and  dried. 
This  upheaval  took  place  in  England.  The  mid- 
dle-class of  the  towns  brought  it  on,  and  the 
yeomanry  of  the  country  districts  fought  it  out. 
Curiously  enough,  in  all  the  three  great  bour- 
geois risings,  the  peasantry  furnishes  the  army 
that  has  to  do  the  fighting;  and  the  peasantry  is 
just  the  class  that,  the  victory  once  gained,  is 
most  surely  ruined  by  the  economic  consequences 
of  that  victory.  A  hundred  years  after  Crom- 
well, the  yeomanry  of  England  had  almost  dis- 
appeared. Anyhow,  had  it  not  been  for  that 
yeomanry  and  for  the  plebeian  element  in  the 
towns,  the  bourgeoisie  alone  would  never  have 
fought  the  matter  out  to  the  bitter  end,  and  would 
never  have  brought  Charles  I.  to  the  scaffold.  In 
order  to  secure  even  those  conquests  of  the  bour- 
geoisie that  were  ripe  for  gathering  at  the  time, 


28  INTRODUCTION 

the  revolution  had  to  be  carried  considerably 
further  —  exactly  as  in  1793  in  France  and  1848 
in  Germany.  This  seems,  in  fact,  to  be  one  of 
the   laws   of  evolution  of  bourgeois   society. 

Well,  upon  this  excess  of  revolutionary  activ- 
ity there  necessarily  followed  the  inevitable  reac- 
tion which  in  its  turn  went  beyond  the  point 
where  it  might  have  maintained  itself.  After  a 
series  of  oscillations,  the  new  center  of  gravity 
was  at  last  attained  and  became  a  new  starting- 
point.  The  grand  period  of  English  history, 
known  to  respectability  under  the  name  of  "  the 
Great  Rebellion,"  and  the  struggles  succeeding 
it,  were  brought  to  a  close  by  the  comparatively 
puny  event  entitled  by  Liberal  historians,  "  the 
Glorious   Revolution." 

The  new  starting-point  was  a  compromise  be- 
tween the  rising  middle-class  and  the  ex-feudal 
landowners.  The  latter,  though  called,  as  now, 
the  aristocracy,  had  been  long  since  on  the  way 
which  led  them  to  become  what  Louis  Philippe 
in  France  became  at  a  much  later  period,  "  the 
first  bourgeois  of  the  kingdom."  Fortunately 
for  England,  the  old  feudal  barons  had  killed  one 
another  during  the  Wars  of  the  Roses.  Their 
successors,  though  mostly  scions  of  the  old  fam- 
ilies, had  been  so  much  out  of  the  direct  line  o| 
descent  that  they  constituted  quite  a  new  body, 
with  habits  and  tendencies  far  more  bourgeois 
than  feudal.  They  fully  understood  the  value  of 
money,  and  at  once  began  to  increase  «-^'o?*  rents 


INTRODUCTION  29 

by  turning  hundreds  of  small  farmers  out  and 
replacing  them  by  sheep.  Henry  VIII.,  while 
squandering  the  Church  lands,  created  fresh 
bourgeois  landlords  by  wholesale ;  the  innumera- 
ble confiscations  of  estates,  regranted  to  absolute 
or  relative  upstarts,  and  continued  during  the 
whole  of  the  seventeenth  century,  had  the  same 
result.  Consequently,  ever  since  Henry  VII.,  the 
English  "  aristocracy,"  far  from  conteracting  the 
development  of  industrial  production,  had,  on 
the  contrary,  sought  to  indirectly  profit  thereby; 
and  there  had  always  been  a  section  of  the  great 
landowners  willing,  from  economical  or  political 
reasons,  to  co-operate  with  the  leading  men  of 
the  financial  and  industrial  bourgeoisie.  The 
compromise  of  i68g  was,  therefore,  easily  accom- 
plished. The  political  spoils  of  "  pelf  and  place  " 
were  left  to  the  great  land-owning  families,  pro- 
vided the  economic  interests  of  the  financial, 
manufacturing,  and  commercial  middle-class 
were  sufficiently  attended  to.  And  these  economic 
interests  were  at  that  time  powerful  enough  to 
determine  the  general  policy  of  the  nation. 
There  might  be  squabbles  about  matters  of  de- 
tail, but,  on  the  whole,  the  aristocratic  oligarchy 
knew  too  well  that  its  own  economic  prosperity 
was  irretrievably  bound  up  with  that  of  the  in- 
dustrial and  commercial  middle-class. 

From  that  time,  the  bourgeoisie  was  a  hum- 
ble, but  still  a  recognized  component  of  the  rul- 
ing classes  of  England.     With  the  rest  of  them. 


30  INTRODUCTION 

it  had  a  common  interest  in  keeping  in  subc 
jection  the  great  working  mass  of  the  nation. 
The  merchant  or  manufacturer  himself  stood  in 
the  position  of  master,  or,  as  it  was  until  lately 
called,  of  "  natural  superior "  to  his  clerks,  his 
workpeople,  his  domestic  servants.  His  interest 
was  to  get  as  much  and  as  good  work  out  of 
them  as  he  could;  for  this  end  they  had  to  be 
trained  to  proper  submission.  He  was  himself 
religious ;  his  religion  had  supplied  the  standard 
under  which  he  had  fought  the  king  and  the 
lords ;  he  was  not  long  in  discovering  the  oppor- 
tunities this  same  religion  offered  b'm  for  work- 
ing upon  the  minds  of  his  natural  inferiors,  and 
making  them  submissive  to  the  behests  of  the 
masters  it  had  pleased  God  to  place  over  them. 
In  short,  the  English  bourgeoisie  now  had  to  take 
a  part  in  keeping  down  the  "lower  orders,"  the 
great  producing  mass  of  the  nation,  and  one  of 
the  means  employed  for  that  purpose  was  the 
influence  of  religion. 

There  was  another  fact  that  contributed  to 
strengthen  the  religious  leanings  of  the  bour- 
geoisie. That  was  the  rise  of  materialism  in 
England.  This  new  doctrine  not  only  shocked 
the  pious  feelings  of  the  middle-class ;  it  an- 
nounced itself  as  a  philosophy  only  fit  for  schol- 
ars and  cultivated  men  of  the  world,  in  contrast 
to  religion  which  was  good  enough  for  the  un- 
educated masses,  including  the  bourgeoisie. 
With   Hobbes  it  stepped  on  the  stage  as  a  de- 


INTRODUCTION  3I 

fender  of  royal  prerogative  and  omnipotence ;  it 
called  upon  absolute  monarchy  to  keep  down  that 
puer  robustns  sed  malitiosus,  to  wit,  the  people. 
Similarly,  with  the  successors  of  Hobbes,  with 
Bolingbroke,  Shaftesbury,  etc.,  the  new  deistic 
form  of  materialism  remained  an  aristocratic, 
esoteric  doctrine,  and,  therefore,  hateful  to  the 
middle-class  both  for  its  religious  heresy  and  for 
its  anti-bourgeois  political  connections.  Accord- 
in^^ly,  in  opposition  to  the  materialism  and  deism 
of  the  aristocracy,  those  Protestant  sects  which 
had  furnished  the  flag  and  the  fighting  contin- 
gent against  the  Stuarts,  continued  to  furnish 
the  main  strength  of  the  progressive  middle- 
class,  and  form  even  to-day  the  backbone  of 
*'  the  Great  Liberal  Party." 

In  the  meantime  materialism  passed  from  Eng- 
land to  France,  where  it  met  and  coalesced  with 
another  materialistic  school  of  philosophers,  a 
branch  of  Cartesianism.  In  France,  too,  it  re- 
mained at  first  an  exclusively  aristocratic  doc- 
trine. But  soon  its  revolutionary  character  as- 
serted itself.  The  French  materialists  did  not 
limit  their  criticism  to  matters  of  religious  belief; 
they  extended  it  to  whatever  scientific  tradition 
or  political  institution  they  met  with ;  and  to 
prove  the  claim  of  their  doctrine  to  universal 
application,  they  took  the  shortest  cut,  and  boldly 
applied  it  to  all  subjects  of  knowledge  in  the 
giant  work  after  which  they  were  named  —  the 
Encyclopedic.     Thus,  in  one  or  the  other  of  its 


32  INTRODUCTION 

two  forms  — avowed  materialism  or  deism  —  it 
became  the  creed  of  the  whole  cultured  youth  of 
France;  so  much  so  that,  when  the  great  Revo- 
lution broke  out,  the  doctrine  hatched  by  Eng- 
lish Royalists  gave  a  theoretical  flag  to  French 
Republicans  and  Terrorists,  and  furnished  tl.e 
text  for  the  Declaration  of  the  Rights  of  Man, 
The  great  French  Revolution  was  the  third  up- 
rising of  the  bourgeoisie,  but  the  first  that  had 
entirely  cast  off  the  religious  cloak,  and  was 
fought  out  on  undisguised  political  lines;  it  was 
the  first,  too,  that  was  really  fought  out  to  the 
destruction  of  one  of  the  combatants,  the  aris- 
tocracy, and  the  complete  triumph  of  the  other, 
the  bourgeoisie.  In  England  the  continuity  of 
pre-revolutionary  and  post-revolutionary  institu- 
tions, and  the  compromise  between  landlords  and 
capitalists,  found  its  expression  in  the  continuity 
of  judicial  precedents  and  in  the  religious 
preservation  of  the  feudal  forms  of  the  law.  In 
France  the  Revolution  constituted  a  complete 
breach  with  the  traditions  of  the  past;  it  cleared 
out  the  very  last  vestiges  of  feudalism,  and  cre- 
ated in  the  Code  Civil  a  masterly  adaptation  of 
the  old  Roman  law  —  that  almost  perfect  expres- 
sion of  the  juridical  relations  corresponding  to 
the  economic  stage  called  by  Marx  the  produc- 
tion of  commodities  —  to  modern  capitalistic  con- 
ditions; so  masterly  that  this  French  revolution- 
ary code  still  serves  as  a  model  for  reforms  of 
the  law  of  property  in  all  other  countries,  not 


INTRODUCTION  33 

excepting  England.  Let  us,  however,  not  forget 
that  if  EngHsh  law  continues  to  express  the 
economic  relations  of  capitalistic  society  in  that 
barbarous  feudal  language  which  corresponds  to 
the  thing  expressed,  just  as  English  spelling 
corresponds  to  English  pronunciation  —  vous 
ecrivez  Londres  et  vous  prononcez  Constanti' 
nople,  said  a  Frenchman  —  that  same  English 
law  is  the  only  one  which  has  preserved  through 
ages,  and  transmitted  to  America  and  the  Col- 
onies the  best  part  of  that  old  Germanic  personal 
freedom,  local  self-government,  and  independence 
from  all  interference  but  that  of  the  law  courts, 
which  on  the  Continent  has  been  lost  during  the 
period  of  absolute  monarchy,  and  has  nowhere 
been  as  yet  fully  recovered. 

To  return  to  our  British  bourgeois.  The 
French  Revolution  gave  him  a  splendid  oppor- 
tunity, with  the  help  of  the  Continental  mon- 
archies, to  destroy  French  maritime  commerce, 
to  annex  French  colonies,  and  to  crush  the  last 
French  pretensions  to  maritime  rivalry.  That 
was  one  reason  why  he  fought  it.  Another  was 
that  the  ways  of  this  revolution  went  very  much 
against  his  grain.  Not  only  its  "  execrable  "  ter- 
rorism, but  the  very  attempt  to  carry  bourgeois 
rule  to  extremes.  What  should  the  British 
bourgeois  do  without  his  aristocracy,  that  taught 
him  manners,  such  as  they  were,  and  invented 
fashions  for  him  —  that  furnished  officers  for  the 
army,  which  kept  order  at  home,  and  the  navy, 


34  INTRODUCTION 

which  conquered  colonial  possessions  and  new 
markets  abroad?  There  was  indeed  a  progres- 
sive minority  of  the  bourgeoisie,  that  minority 
whose  interests  were  not  so  well  attended  to 
under  the  compromise ;  this  section,  composed 
chiefly  of  the  less  wealthy  middle-class,  did  sym- 
pathize with  the  Revolution,  but  it  was  power- 
less in  Parliament. 

Thus,  if  materialism  became  the  creed  of  the 
French  Revolution,  the  God-fearing  English 
bourgeois  held  all  the  faster  to  his  religion.  Had 
not  the  reign  of  terror  in  Paris  proved  what  was 
the  upshot,  if  the  religious  instincts  of  the 
masses  were  lost?  The  more  materialism  spread 
from  France  to  neighboring  countries,  and  was 
reinforced  by  similar  doctrinal  currents,  notably 
by  German  philosophy,  the  more,  in  fact,  ma- 
terialism and  freethought  generally  became,  on 
the  Continent,  the  necessary  qualifications  of  a 
cultivated  man,  the  more  stubbornly  the  English 
middle-class  stuck  to  its  manifold  religious 
creeds.  These  creeds  might  differ  from  one 
another,  but  they  were,  all  of  them,  distinctly 
religious.  Christian  creeds. 

While  the  Revolution  ensured  the  political  tri- 
umph of  the  bourgeoisie  in  France,  in  England 
Watt,  Arkwright,  Cartwright,  and  others,  ini- 
tiated an  industrial  revolution,  which  completely 
shifted  the  center  of  gravity  of  economic  power. 
The  wealth  of  the  bourgeoisie  increased  consid- 
erably faster  than  that  of  the  landed  aristocrac)'. 


INTRODUCTION^  35 

Within  *he  bourgeoisie  itself,  the  financial  aris-- 
tocracy,  the  bankers,  etc.,  were  more  and  more 
pushed  into  the  background  by  the  manufact- 
urers. The  compromise  of  1689,  even  after  the 
gradual  changes  it  had  undergone  in  favor  of 
the  bourgeoisie,  no  longer  corresponded  to  the 
relative  position  of  the  parties  to  it.  The  char- 
acter of  these  parties,  too,  had  changed ;  the 
bourgeoisie  of  1830  was  very  different  from  that 
of  the  preceding  century.  The  political  power 
still  left  to  the  aristocracy,  and  used  by  them  to 
resist  the  pretensions  of  the  new  industrial  bour- 
geoisie, became  incompatible  with  the  new  eco- 
nomic interests.  A  fresh  struggle  with  the 
aristocracy  was  necessary;  it  could  end  only  in  a 
victory  of  the  new  econom'ic  power.  First,  the 
Reform  Act  was  pushed  through,  in  spite  of  all 
resistance,  under  the  impulse  of  the  French  Revo- 
lution of  1830.  It  gave  to  the  bourgeoisie  a 
recognized  and  powerful  place  in  Parliament. 
Then  the  Repeal  of  the  Corn  Laws,  which  settled, 
once  for  all,  the  supremacy  of  the  bourgeoisie, 
and  especially  of  its  most  active  portion,  the 
manufacturers,  over  the  landed  aristocracy. 
This  was  the  greatest  victory  of  the  bourgeoisie ; 
it  was,  however,  also  the  last  it  gained  in  its 
own  exclusive  interest.  Whatever  triumphs  it 
obtained  later  on,  it  had  to  share  with  a  new 
social  power,  first  its  ally,  but  soon  its  rival. 

The  industrial  revolution  had  created  a  class 
of   large    manufacturing   capitalists,    but    also    a 


36  INTRODUCTION 

class  —  and  a  far  more  numerous  one  —  of  man- 
ufacturing work-people.  This  class  gradually  in- 
creased in  numbers,  in  proportion  as  the  indus- 
trial revolution  seized  upon  one  branch  of  manu- 
facture after  another,  and  in  the  same  proportion 
it  increased  in  power.  This  power  it  proved  as 
early  as  1824,  by  forcing  a  reluctant  Parliament  to 
repeal  the  acts  forbidding  combinations  of  work- 
men. During  the  Reform  agitation,  the  working- 
men  constituted  the  Radical  wing  of  the  Reform 
•party;  the  Act  of  1832  having  excluded  them  from 
the  suffrage,  they  formulated  their  demands  in  the 
People's  Charter,  and  constituted  themselves,  in 
opposition  to  the  great  bourgeois  Anti-Corn  Law 
party,  into  an  independent  party,  the  Chartists, 
the  first  working-men's  party  of  modern  times. 

Then  came  the  Continental  revolutions  of 
February  and  March,  1848,  in  which  the  work- 
ing people  played  such  a  prominent  part,  and,  at 
least  in  Paris,  put  forward  demands  which  were 
certainly  inadmissible  from  the  point  of  view  of 
capitalistic  society.  And  then  came  the  general 
reaction.  First  the  defeat  of  the  Chartists  on 
the  loth  April,  1848,  then  the  crushing  of  the 
Paris  working-men's  insurrection  in  June  of  the 
same  year,  then  the  disasters  of  1849  i^i  Italy, 
Hungary,  South  Germany,  and  at  last  the  victory 
of  Louis  Bonaparte  over  Paris,  2nd  December, 
1851.  For  a  time,  at  least,  the  bugbear  of  work- 
ing-class pretensions  was  put  down,  but  at  what 
cost!     ft   tne   British   bourgeois   had   been   con- 


INTRODUCTION  37 

vinced  before  of  the  necessity  of  maintaining  the 
common  people  in  a  reHgious  mood,  how  much 
more  must  he  feel  that  necessity  after  all  these 
experiences?  Regardless  of  the  sneers  of  his 
Continental  compeers,  he  continued  to  spend  thou- 
sands and  tens  of  thousands,  year  after  year, 
upon  the  evangelization  of  the  lower  orders ;  not 
content  with  his  own  native  religious  machinery, 
he  appealed  to  Brother  Jonathan,  the  greatest 
organizer  in  existence  of  religion  as  a  trade,  and 
imported  from  America  revivalism.  Moody  and 
Sankey,  and  the  like ;  and,  finally,  he  accepted  the 
dangerous  aid  of  the  Salvation  Army,  which  re- 
vives the  propaganda  of  early  Christianity,  ap- 
peals to  the  poor  as  the  elect,  fights  capitalism  in 
a  religious  way,  and  thus  fosters  an  element  of 
early  Christian  class  antagonism,  which  one  day 
may  become  troublesome  to  the  well-to-do  peo- 
ple who  now  find  tlie  ready  money  for  it. 

It  seems  a  law  of  historical  development  that 
the  bourgeoisie  can  in  no  European  country  get 
hold  of  political  power  —  at  least  for  any  length 
of  time  —  in  the  same  exclusive  way  in  which 
the  feudal  aristocracy  kept  hold  of  it  during  the 
Middle  Ages.  Even  in  France,  where  feudalism 
was  completely  extinguished,  the  bourgeoisie,  as 
a  whole,  has  held  full  possession  of  the  Govern- 
ment for  very  short  periods  only.  During  Louis 
Philippe's  reign,  1830-48,  a  very  small  portion 
of  the  bourgeoisie  ruled  the  kingdom ;  by  far  the 
larger  part  were  cxcluded_from  the  suffrage  by 


38  INTRODUCTION 

the  high  qualification.  Under  the  second  Repub- 
lic, 1848-51,  the  whole  bourgeoisie  ruled,  but  for 
three  years  only;  their  incapacity  bro-ught  en  the 
second  Empire.  It  is  only  now,  in  the  third 
Republic,  that  the  bourgeoisie  as  a  whole  have 
kept  possession  of  the  helm  for  more  than  twenty 
years ;  and  they  are  already  showing  lively  signs 
of  decadence.  A  durable  reign  of  the  bourgeoisie 
has  been  possible  only  in  countries  like  America, 
where  feudalism  was  unknown,  and  society  at 
the  very  beginning  started  from  a  bourgeois 
basis.  And  even  in  France  and  America,  the 
successors  of  the  bourgeoisie,  the  working  peo- 
ple, are  already  knocking  at  the  door. 

In  England,  the  bourgeoisie  never  held  undi- 
vided sway.  Even  the  victory  of  1832  left  the 
landed  aristocracy  in  almost  exclusive  possession 
of  all  the  leading  Government  offices.  The 
meekness  with  which  the  wealthy  middle-class 
submitted  to  this,  remained  inconceivable  to  me 
until  the  great  Liberal  manufacturer,  Mr.  W.  A. 
Forster,  in  a  public  speech  implored  the  young 
men  of  Bradford  to  learn  French,  as  a  means 
to  get  on  in  the  world,  and  quoted  from  his  own 
experience  how  sheepish  he  looked  when,  as  a 
Cabinet  Minister,  he  had  to  move  in  society 
where  French  was,  at  least,  as  necessary  as  Eng- 
lish !  The  fact  was,  the  English  middle-class  of 
that  time  were,  as  a  rule,  quite  uneducated  up- 
starts, and  could  not  help  leaving  to  the  aris- 
tocracy those  superior  Government  places  where 


INTRODUCTION  39 

other  qualifications  were  required  than  mere  in- 
sular narrowness  and  insular  conceit,  seasoned 
by  business  sharpness.^  Even  now  the  endless 
newspaper  debates  about  middle-class  education 
show  that  the  English  middle-class  docs  not  yet 
consider  itself  good  enough  for  the  best  educa- 
tion, and  looks  to  something  more  modest.  Thus, 
even  after  the  Repeal  of  the  Corn  Laws,  it  ap- 
peared a  matter  of  course,  that  the  men  who  had 
carried  the  day,  the  Cobdens,  Brights,  Forsters, 
etc.,  should  remain  excluded  from  a  share  in  the 
official  government  of  the  country,  until  twenty 

^  And  even  in  business  matters,  the  conceit  of  national 
Chauvinism  is  but  a  sorry  adviser.  Up  to  quite  recently,  the 
average  English  manufacturer  considered  it  derogatory  from 
an  Englishman  to  speak  any  language  but  his  own,  and  felt 
rather  proud  than  otherwise  of  the  fact  that  "  poor  devils  "  of 
foreigners  settled  in  England  and  took  off  his  hands  the  trou- 
bl«  of  disposing  of  his  products  abroad.  He  never  noticed 
that  these  foreigners,  mostly  Germans,  thus  got  command  of 
a  very  large  part  of  British  foreign  trade,  imports  and  ex- 
ports, and  that  the  direct  foreign  trade  of  Englishmen  became 
limited,  almost  entirely,  to  the  colonies,  China,  the  United 
States,  and  South  America.  Nor  did  he  notice  that  these 
Germans  traded  with  other  Germans  abroad,  who  gradually 
organized  a  complete  network  of  commercial  colonies  all  over 
the  world.  But  when  Germany,  about  forty  years  ago,  seri- 
ously began  manufacturing  for  export,  this  network  served 
her  admirably  in  her  transformation,  in  so  short  a  time,  from 
a  corn-exporting  into  a  first-rate  manufacturing  country. 
Then,  about  ten  years  ago,  the  British  manufacturer  got 
frightened,  and  asked  his  ambassadors  and  consuls  how  it 
was  that  he  could  no  longer  keep  his  customers  together. 
The  unanimous  answer  was:  (i)  You  don't  learn  your  cus- 
tomer's language  but  expect  him  to  speak  your  own;  (2)  You 
«lon't  even  try  to  suit  your  customer's  wants,  habits,  and 
tustes,  but  expect  him  to  conform  to  your  English  ones. 


40  INTRODUCTION 

years  afterwards,  a  new  Reform  Act  opened  to 
them  the  door  of  the  Cabinet.  The  English 
bourgeoisie  are,  up  to  the  present  day,  so  deeply 
penetrated  by  a  sense  of  their  social  inferiority 
that  they  keep  up,  at  their  own  expense  and  that 
of  the  nation,  an  ornamental  caste  of  drones  to 
represent  the  nation  worthily  at  all  State  func- 
tions ;  and  they  consider  themselves  highly  hon- 
ored whenever  one  of  themselves  is  found  worthy 
of  admission  into  this  select  and  privileged  body, 
manufactured,  after  all,  by  themselves. 

The  industrial  and  commercial  middle-class 
had,  therefore,  not  yet  succeeded  in  driving  the 
landed  aristocracy  completely  from  political 
power  when  another  competitor,  the  working- 
class,  appeared  on  the  stage.  The  reaction  after 
the  Chartist  movement  and  the  Continental  revo- 
lutions, as  well  as  the  unparalleled  extension  of 
English  trade  from  1848-1866,  (ascribed  vulgarly 
to  Free  Trade  alone,  but  due  far  more  to  the 
colossal  development  of  railways,  ocean  steamers, 
and  means  of  intercourse  generally),  had  again 
driven  the  working-class  into  the  dependency  of 
the  Liberal  party,  of  which  they  formed,  as  in 
pre-Chartist  times,  the  Radical  wing.  Their 
claims  to  the  franchise,  however,  gradually  be- 
came irresistible;  while  the  Whig  leaders  of  the 
Liberals  "  funked,"  Disraeli  showed  his  superior- 
ity by  making  the  Tories  seize  the  favorable 
moment  and  introduce  household  suffrage  in  the 
boroughs,    along   wjth   a    redistribution   of   seats. 


INTRODUCTION  4I 

Then  followed  the  ballot ;  then  in  1884  the  ex- 
tension of  household  suffrage  to  the  counties 
and  a  fresh  redistribution  of  seats,  by  which 
electoral  districts  were  to  some  extent  equalized. 
All  these  measures  considerably  increased  the 
electoral  power  of  the  working-class,  so  much  so 
that  in  at  least  150  to  200  constituencies  that 
class  now  furnishes  the  majority  of  voters.  But 
parliamentary  government  is  a  capital  school  for 
teaching  respect  for  tradition;  if  the  middle-class 
look  with  awe  and  veneration  upon  what  Lord 
John  Manners  playfully  called  "  our  old  nobil- 
ity," the  mass  of  the  working-people  then  looked 
up  with  respect  and  deference  to  what  used  to 
be  designated  as  "  their  betters,"  the  middle-class. 
Indeed,  the  British  workman,  some  fifteen  years 
ago,  was  the  model  workman,  whose  respectful 
regard  for  the  position  of  his  master,  and  whose 
self-restraining  modesty  in  claiming  rights  for 
himself,  consoled  our  German  economists  of  the 
Katheder-Socialist  school  for  the  incurable  com- 
munistic and  revolutionary  tendencies  of  their 
own  working-men  at  home. 

But  the  English  middle-class  —  the  good  men 
of  business  as  they  are  —  saw  farther  than  the 
German  professors.  They  had  shared  their 
power  but  reluctantly  with  the  working-class. 
They  had  learnt,  during  the  Chartist  years,  what 
that  pucr  robnstus  sed  nialitiosus,  the  people,  is 
capable  of.  And  since  that  time,  they  had  been 
compelled   to   incorporate   the   better  part   of  the 


42  INTRODUCTION 

People's  Charter  in  the  Statutes  of  the  United 
Kingdom.  Now,  if  ever,  the  people  must  be  kept 
in  order  by  moral  means,  and  the  first  and  fore- 
most of  all  moral  means  of  action  upon  the 
masses  is  and  remains  —  religion.  Hence  the 
parsons'  majorities  on  the  School  Boards,  hence 
the  increasing  self-taxation  of  the  bourgeoisie 
for  the  support  of  all  sorts  of  revivalism,  from 
ritualism  to  the   Salvation  Army. 

And  now  came  the  triumph  of  British  respecta- 
bility over  the  freethought  and  religious  laxity 
of  the  Continental  bourgeois.  The  workmen  of 
France  and  Germany  had  become  rebellious. 
They  were  thoroughly  infected  with  socialism, 
and,  for  very  good  reasons,  were  not  at  all  par- 
ticular as  to  the  legality  of  the  means  by  which 
to  secure  their  own  ascendency.  The  piier  ro- 
hustiis,  here,  turned  from  day  to  day  more 
malitiosus.  Nothing  remained  to  the  French 
and  German  bourgeoisie  as  a  last  resource  but  to 
silently  drop  their  freethought,  as  a  youngster, 
when  sea-sickness  creeps  upon  him,  quietly  drops 
the  burning  cigar  he  brought  swaggeringly  on 
board ;  one  by  one,  the  scoffers  turned  pious  in 
outward  behavior,  spoke  with  respect  of  the 
Church,  its  dogmas  and  rites,  and  even  conformed 
with  the  latter  as  far  as  could  not  be  helped. 
French  bourgeoisie  dined  maigre  on  Fridays,  and 
German  ones  sat  out  long  Protestant  sermons  in 
their  pews  on  Sundays.  They  had  come  to  grief 
with     materialism.     "  Die    Religion    muss    dem 


INTRODUCTION  43 

Volk  erhalten  werden," —  religion  must  be  kept 
alive  for  the  people  —  that  was  the  only  and  the 
last  means  to  save  society  from  utter  ruin.  Un- 
fortunately for  themselves,  they  did  not  find  this 
out  until  they  had  done  their  level  best  to  break 
up  religion  for  ever.  And  now  it  was  the  turn 
of  the  British  bourgeois  to  sneer  and  to  say : 
"  Why,  you  fools,  I  could  have  told  you  that  two 
hundred  years  ago !" 

However,  I  am  afraid  neither  the  religious 
stolidity  of  the  British,  nor  the  post  festum  con- 
version of  the  Continental  bourgeois  will  stem 
the  rising  Proletarian  tide.  Tradition  is  a  great 
retarding  force,  is  the  vis  inertice  of  history,  but, 
being  merely  passive,  is  sure  to  be  broken  down ; 
and  thus  religion  will  be  no  lasting  safeguard  to 
capitalist  society.  If  our  juridical,  philosophical, 
and  religious  ideas  are  the  more  or  less  remote 
offshoots  of  the  economical  relations  prevailing 
in  a  given  society,  such  ideas  cannot,  in  the  long 
run,  withstand  the  effects  of  a  complete  change 
in  these  relations.  And,  unless  we  believe  in 
supernatural  revelation,  we  must  admit  that  no 
religious  tenets  will  ever  suffice  to  prop  up  a 
tottering  society. 

In  fact,  in  England,  too,  the  working-people 
have  begun  to  move  again.  They  are,  no  doubt, 
shackled  by  traditions  of  various  kinds.  Bour- 
geois traditions,  such  as  the  widespread  belief 
that  there  can  be  but  two  parties,  Conservatives 
and    Liberals,    and   that   the    working-class   must 


44  INTRODUCTION 

work  out  its  salvation  by  and  through  the  great 
Liberal  party.  Working-men's  traditions,  inher- 
ited from  their  first  tentative  efforts  at  independ- 
ent action,  such  as  the  exclusion,  from  ever  so 
many  old  Trade  Unions,  of  all  applicants  who 
have  not  gone  through  a  regular  apprenticeship; 
which  means  the  breeding,  by  every  such  union, 
of  its  own  blacklegs.  But  for  all  that  the  Eng- 
lish working-class  is  moving,  as  even  Professor 
Brentano  has  sorrowfully  had  to  report  to  his 
brother  Katheder-Socialists.  It  moves,  like  all 
things  in  England,  with  a  slow  and  measured 
step,  with  hesitation  here,  with  more  or  less  un- 
fruitful, tentative  attempts  there ;  it  moves  now 
and  then  with  an  over-cautious  mistrust  of  the 
name  of  Socialism,  while  it  gradually  absorbs 
the  substance;  and  the  movement  spreads  and 
seizes  one  layer  of  the  workers  after  another. 
It  has  now  shaken  out  of  their  torpor  the  un- 
skilled laborers  of  the  East  End  of  London,  and 
we  all  know  what  a  splendid  impulse  these  fresh 
forces  have  given  it  in  return.  :And  if  the  pace 
of  the  movement  is  not  up  to  the  impatience  of 
some  people,  let  them  not  forget  that  it  is  the 
working-class  which  keeps  alive  the  finest  qual- 
ities of  the  English  character,  and  that,  if  a  step 
in  advance  is  once  gained  in  England,  it  is,  as  a 
rule,  never  lost  afterwards.  If  the  sons  of  the 
old  Cliartists,  for  reasons  explained  above,  were 
not  quite  up  to  the  mark,  the  grandsons  bid  fair 
to  be  worthy  of  their  forefathers. 


INTRODUCTION  45 

But  the  triumph  of  the  European  working-class 
does  not  depend  upon  England  alone.  It  can 
only  be  secured  by  the  co-operation  of,  at  least, 
England,  France,  and  Germany.  In  both  the  lat- 
ter countries  the  working-class  movement  is  well 
ahead  of  England.  In  Germany  it  is  even  within 
measurable  distance  of  success.  The  progress 
it  has  there  made  during  the  last  twenty-five  years 
is  unparalleled.  It  advances  with  ever-increasing 
velocity.  If  the  German  middle-class  have 
shown  themselves  lamentably  deficient  in  political 
capacity,  discipline,  courage,  energy,  and  perse- 
verance, the  German  working-class  have  given 
ample  proof  of  all  these  qualities.  Four  hundred 
years  ago,  Germany  was  the  starting-point  of  the 
first  upheaval  of  the  European  middle-class ;  as 
things  are  now,  is  it  outside  the  limits  of  possi- 
bility that  Germany  will  be  the  scene,  too,  of  the 
first  great  victory  of  the  European  proletariat? 

F.  Engels. 

'April  20th,  1892. 


SOCIALISM 
UTOPIAN  AND  SCIENTIFIC 


Modern  Socialism  is,  in  its  essence,  the  di- 
rect product  of  the  recognition,  on  the  one 
hand,  of  the  class  antagonisms,  existing  in  ^ 
the  society  of  to-day,  between  proprietors  ; 
and  non-proprietors,  between  capitalists  and 
wage-workers ;  on  the  other  hand,  of  the  an- 
archy existing  in  production.  But,  in  its 
theoretical  form,  modern  Socialism  origi- 
nally appears  ostensibly  as  a  more  logical 
extension  of  the  principles  laid  down  by  the 
great  French  philosophers  of  the  eighteenth 
century.  Like  every  new  theory,  modern 
Socialism  had,  at  first,  to  connect  itself  with 
the  intellectual  stock-in-trade  ready  to  its 
hand,  however  deeply  its  roots  lay  in  mate- 
rial economic   facts. 

The  great  men,  who  in  France  prepared 
47 


rLTun 

48  SOCIALISM 

men's  minds  for  the  comirg  revolution, 
were  themselves  extreme  revolutionists. 
They  recognized  no  external  authority  of 
any  kind  whatever.  Religion,  natural  sci- 
ence, society,  political  institutions,  every- 
thing, was  subjected  to  the  most  unsparing 
criticism :  everything  must  justify  its  exis- 
tence before  the  judgment-seat  of  reason, 
or  gi^e  up  existence.  Reason  became  the 
sole  measure  of  everything.  It  was  the 
time  when,  as  Hegel  says,  the  world  stood 
upon  its  head ;  ^  first,  in  the  sense  that  the 
human  head,  and  the  principles  arrived  at 

*  This  is  the  passage  on  the  French  Revolution: 
"  Thought,  the  concept  of  law,  all  at  once  made  itself  felt, 
and  against  this  the  old  scaffolding  of  wrong  could  make  no 
stand.  In  this  conception  of  law,  therefore,  a  constitution 
has  now  heen  established,  and  htnceforth  everything  must  be 
based  upon  this.  Since  the  sun  had  been  in  the  firmament, 
and  the  planets  circled  round  him,  the  sight  had  never  been 
seen  of  man  standing  upon  his  head  —  i.e.,  on  the  Idea  — ■ 
and  building  reality  after  this  image.  Anaxagoras  first  said 
that  the  Nous,  reason,  rules  the  world;  but  now,  for  the  first 
time,  had  man  come  to  recognize  that  the  Idea  must  rule  the 
mental  reality.  And  this  was  a  magnificent  sunrise.  All 
thinking  Beings  have  participated  in  celebrating  this  holy  day. 
A  sublime  emotion  swayed  men  at  that  time,  an  enthusiasm 
of  reason  pervaded  the  world,  as  if  now  had  come  the  recon- 
ciliation of  the  Divine  Principle  with  the  world."  [Hegel: 
"  Philosophy  of  History,"  1840,  p.  535.]  Is  it  not  high  time 
to  set  the  anti-Socialist  law  in  action  against  such  teachings, 
subversive  and  to  the  common  danger,  by  the  late  Professor 
Hegel  ? 


UTOPIAN    AND    SCIENTIFIC  49 

by  its  thought,  claimed  to  be  the  basis  of  all 
human  action  and  association;  but  by  and 
by,  also,  in  the  wider  sense  that  the  reality 
which  was  in  contradiction  to  these  princi- 
ples had,  in  fact,  to  be  turned  upside  down. 
Every  form  of  society  and  government  then 
existing,  every  old  traditional  notion  was 
flung  into  the  lumber-room  as  irrational: 
the  world  had  hitherto  allowed  itself  to  be 
led  solely  by  prejudices;  everything  in  the 
past  deserved  only  pity  and  contempt. 
Now,  for  the  first  time,  appeared  the  light 
of  day,  the  kingdom  of  reason ;  henceforth 
superstition,  injustice,  privilege,  oppres- 
sion, were  to  be  superseded  by  eternal  truth, 
eternal  Right,  equality  based  on  Nature  and 
the  inalienable  rights  of  man. 

We  know  to-day  that  this  ^kingdom  of 
reason  was  nothing  more  than  the  idealized 
kmgdorn^j3f.i±Le,  hQurg.eoisie_^  this  eter- 

nal Right  found  its  realization  in  bourgeois 
justice;  that  this  equality  reduced  itself  to 
bourgeois  equality  before  the  law ;  that  bour- 
geois property  was  proclaimed  as  one  of  the 
essential  rights  of  man ;  and  that  the  gov- 
ernment of   reason,   the  Contrat   Social  of 


50  SOCIALISM 

Rousseau,  came  into  being,  and  only  could 
come  into  being,  as  a  democratic  bourgeois 
republic.  The  great  thinkers  of  the  eight- 
eenth century  could,  no  more  than  their 
predecessors,  go  beyond  the  limits  imposed 
upon  them  by  their  epoch. 

But,  side  by  side  with  the  antagonism  of 
the  feudal  nobility  and  the  burghers,  who 
claimed  to  represent  all  the  rest  of  society, 
was  the  general  antagonism  of  exploiters 
and  exploited,  of  rich  idlers  and  poor  work- 
ers. It  was  this  very  circumstance  that 
made  it  possible  for  the  representatives  of 
the  bourgeoisie  to  put  themselves  forward 
as  representing,  not  one  special  class,  but 
the  whole  of  suffering  humanity.  Still 
further.  From  its  origin,  the  bourgeoisie 
was  saddled  with  its  antithesis:  capi- 
talists cannot  exist  without  wage-workers, 
and,  in  the  same  proportion  as  the  mediaeval 
burgher  of  the  guild  developed  into  the 
modern  bourgeois,  the  guild  journeyman 
and  the  day-laborer,  outside  the  guilds,  de- 
veloped into  the  proletarian.  And  although, 
upon  the  whole,  the  bourgeoisie,  in  their 
struggle  with  the  nobility,  could   claim  to 


UTOPIAN    AND    SCIENTIFIC  $1 

vepresent  at  the  same  time  the  interests  of 
the  different  working-classes  of  that  period, 
yet  in  every  great  bourgeois  movement  there 
were  independent  outbursts  of  that  class 
which  was  the  forerunner,  more  or  less  de- 
veloped, of  the  modern  proletariat.  For 
example,  at  the  time  of  the  German  refor- 
mation and  the  peasants'  war,  the  Anabap- 
tists and  Thomas  Aiiinzer ;  in  the  great  Eng- 
lish revolution,  the  Levellers;  in  the  great 
French  revolution,  Baboeuf. 

There  were  theoretical  enunciations  cor- 
responding with  these  revolutionary  upris- 
ings of  a  class  not  yet  developed ;  in  the  six- 
teenth and  seventeenth  centuries,  Utopian 
pictures  of  ideal  social  conditions;  in  the 
eighteenth,  actual  communistic  theories 
(Morelly  and  Mably).  The  demand  for 
equalit}'-  was  no  longer  limited  to  political 
rights;  it  was  extended  also  to  the  social 
conditions  of  individuals.  It  was  not  sim- 
ply class  privileges  that  were  to  be  abolished, 
but  class  distinctions  themselves.  A  Com- 
munism, ascetic,  denouncing  all  the  pleas- 
ures of  life.  Spartan,  was  the  first  form  of 
the   new   teaching.     Then    came   the   three 


52  SOCIALISM 

great  Utopians;  Saint  Simon,  to  whom  the 
middle-class  movement,  side  by  side  with 
the  proletarian,  still  had  a  certain  signifi- 
cance ;  Fourier ;  and  Owen,  who  in  the  coun- 
try where  capitalist  production  was  most 
developed,  and  under  the  influence  of  the 
antagonisms  begotten  of  this,  worked  out 
his  proposals  for  the  removal  of  class  dis- 
tinction systematically  and  in  direct  relation 
to  French  materialism. 

One  thing-  is  common  to  all  three.  Not 
one  of  them  appears  as  a  representative  of 
the  interests  of  that  proletariat,  which  his- 
torical development  had,  in  the  meantime, 
produced.  Like  the  French  philosophers, 
they  do  not  claim  to  emancipate  a  particular 
class  to  bcgiii  with,  but  all  humanity  at 
once.  Like  them,  they  wish  to  bring  in  the 
kingdom  of  reason  and  eternal  justice,  but 
this  kingdom,  as  they  see  it,  is  as  far  as 
heaven  from  earth,  from  that  of  the  French 
philosophers. 

For,  to  our  three  social  reformers,  the 
bourgeois  world,  based  upon  the  principles 
of  these  philosophers,  is  quite  as  irrational 
and  unjust,  and,  therefore,  finds  its  way  «.-kS 


UTOPIAN    AXD    SCIENTIFIC  53 

the  dust-hole  quite  as  readily  as  feudalism 
and  all  the  earlier  stages  of  society.  If 
pure  reason  and  justice  have  not,  hitlierto, 
ruled  the  world,  this  has  been  the  case  only 
because  men  have  not  rightly  understood 
them.  What  was  wanted  was  the  individ- 
ual man  of  genius,  who  has  now  arisen  and 
who  understands  the  truth.  That  he  has 
now  arisen,  that  the  truth  has  now  been 
clearly  understood,  is  not  an  inevitable  event, 
following  of  necessity  in  the  chain  of  his- 
torical development,  but  a  mere  happy  ac- 
cident. He  might  just  as  well  have  been 
born  500  years  earlier,  and  might  then  have 
spared  humanity  500  years  of  error,  strife, 
and  suffering. 

We  saw  how  the  French  philosophers  of 
the  eighteenth  century,  the  forerunners  of 
the  Revolution,  appealed  to  reason  as  the 
sole  judge  of  all  that  is.  A  rational  gov- 
ernment, rational  society,  were  to  be 
founded;  everything  that  ran  counter  to 
eternal  reason  was  to  be  remorselessly  done 
away  with.  We  saw  also  that  this  eternal 
reason  was  in  reality  nothing  but  the  ideal- 
ized  understanding  of  the  eighteenth  cen- 


54  SOCIALISM 

turn  citizen,  just  then  evolving  into  the  bour- 
geois. The  French  Revolution  had  real- 
ized this  rational  society  and  government. 

But  the  new  ordei-  of  things,  rational 
enough  as  compared  with  earlier  conditions, 
turned  out  to  be  by  no  means  absolutely 
rational.  The  State  based  upon  reason 
completely  collapsed.  Rousseau's  Contrat 
Social  had  found  its  realization  in  the  Reign 
of  Terror,  from  which  the  bourgeoisie,  who 
had  lost  confidence  in  their  own  political  ca- 
pacity, had  taken  refuge  first  in  the  corrup- 
tion of  the  Directorate,  and,  finally,  under 
the  wing  of  the  Napoleonic  despotism.  The 
promised  eternal  peace  was  turned  into  an 
endless  war  of  conquest.  The  society  based 
upon  reason  had  fared  no  better.  The  an- 
tagonism between  rich  and  poor,  instead  of 
dissolving  into  general  prosperity,  had  be- 
come intensified  by  the  removal  of  the  guild 
and  other  privileges,  which  had  to  some  ex- 
tent bridged  it  over,  and  by  the  removal  of 
the  charitable  institutions  of  the  Church. 
The  "  freedom  of  property "  from  feudal 
fetters,  now  veritably  accomplished,  turned 
out  to  be,  for  the  small  capitalists  and  small 


UTOPIAN    AND    SCIENTIFIC  55 

proprietors,  the  freedom  to  sell  their  small 
property,  crushed  under  the  overmastering 
competition  of  the  large  capitalists  and 
landlords,  to  these  great  lords,  and  thus,  as 
far  as  the  small  capitalists  and  peasant  pro- 
prietors were  concerned,  became  "  freedom 
from  property,"  The  development  of  in- 
dustry upon  a  capitalistic  basis  made  pov- 
erty and  misery  of  the  working  masses  con- 
ditions of  existence  of  society.  Cash  pay- 
ment became  more  and  more,  in  Carlyle's 
phrase,  the  sole  nexus  between  man  and 
man.  The  number  of  crimes  increased 
from  year  to  year.  Formerly,  the  feudal 
vices  had  openly  stalked  about  in  broad  day- 
light ;  though  not  eradicated,  they  were 
now  at  any  rate  thrust  into  the  background. 
In  their  stead,  the  bourgeois  vices,  hitherto 
practiced  in  secret,  began  to  blossom  all  the 
more  luxuriantly.  Trade  became  to  a 
greater  and  greater  extent  cheating.  The 
"  fraternity "  of  the  revolutionary  motto 
was  realized  in  the  chicanery  and  rivalries  of 
the  battle  of  competition.  Oppression  by 
force  was  replaced  by  corruption ;  the 
sword,   as   the   first   social   lever,   by   gold. 


'56  SOCIALISM 

The  right  of  the  first  night  was  transferred 
from  the  feudal  lords  to  the  bourgeois  man- 
ufacturers. Prostitution  increased  to  an  ex- 
tent never  heard  of.  Marriage  itself  re- 
mained, as  before,  the  legally  recognized 
form,  the  official  cloak  of  prostitution,  and, 
moreover,  was  supplemented  by  rich  crops 
of  adultery. 

In  a  word,  compared  with  the  splendid 
promises  of  the  philosophers,  the  social  and 
political  institutions  born  of  the  "  triumph 
of  reason  "  were  bitterly  disappointing  cari- 
catures. All  that  was  wanting  was  the  men 
to  formulate  this  disappointment,  and  they 
came  with  the  turn  of  the  century.  In  1802 
Saint  Simon's  Geneva  letters  appeared;  in 
1808  appeared  Fourier's  first  work,  al- 
though the  groundwork  of  his  theory  dated 
from  1799;  on  January  i,  1800,  Robert 
Owen  undertook  the  direction  of  New  Lan- 
ark. 

At  this  time,  however,  the  capitalist  mode 
of  production,  and  Avith  it  the  antagonism 
between  the  bourgeoisie  and  the  proletariat, 
was  still  very  incompletely  developed. 
Modern  Industr}'',  which  had  just  arisen  in 


UTOPIAN    AND    SCIENTIFIC  57 

England,  was  still  unkiiown  in  France. 
But  Modern  Industry  develops,  on  the  one 
hand,  the  conflicts  which  make  absolutely 
necessary  a  revolution  in  the  mode  of  pro- 
duction, and  the  doing  away  with  its  capi- 
talistic character  —  conflicts  not  only  be- 
tween the  classes  begotten  of  it,  but  also 
between  the  ver}^  productive,  forces  and  the^v 
forms  of  exchange  created  by  it.  And,  on  '; 
the  other  hand,  it  develops,  in  these  very  gi- 
gantic_  productive  forces,  the  means  of  end- 
ing these  conflicts.  If,  therefore,  about  the 
year  1800,  the  conflicts  arising  from  the  new 
social  order  were  only  just  beginning  to  take 
shape,  this  holds  still  more  fully  as  to  the 
means  of  ending  them.  The  "  have-noth-\\ 
ing  "  masses  of  Paris,  during  the  Reign  of  y 
Terror,  were  able  for  a  moment  to  gain  the"""~ 
mastery,  and  thus  to  lead  the  bourgeois 
revolution  to  victory  in  spite  of  the  bour- 
geoisie themselves.  But,  in  doing  so,  they 
only  proved  how  impossible  it  was  for  their 
domination  to  last  under  the  conditions  then 
obtaining.  The  proletariat,  which  then  for 
the  first  time  evolved  itself  from  these 
"  have-nothing  "  masses  as  the  nucleus  of  a 


58  SOCIALISM 

new  class,  as  yet  quite  incapable  of  inde- 
pendent political  action,  appeared  as  an  op- 
pressed, suffering"  order,  to  whom,  in  its 
incapacity  to  help  itself,  help  could,  at  best, 
be  brought  in  from  without,  or  down  from 
above. 

This  historical  situation  also  dominated 
the  founders  of  Socialism.  To  the  crude 
conditions  of  capitalistic  production  and  the 
crude  class  conditions  corresponded  crude 
theories.  The  solution  of  the  social  prob- 
lems, which  as  yet  lay  hidden  in  undeveloped 
economic  conditions,  the  Utopians  at- 
tempted to  evolve  out  of  the  human  brain./ 
Society  presented  nothing  but  wrongs;  to 
remove  these  was  the  task  of  reason.  It 
was  necessary,  then,  to  discover  a  new  and 
more  perfect  system  of  social  order  and  to 
impose  this  upon  society  from  without  by 
propaganda,  and,  wherever  it  was  possible, 
by  the  example  of  model  experiments. 
These  new  social  systems  were  foredoomed 
as  Utopian ;  the  more  completely  they  were 
worked  out  in  detail,  the  more  they  could 
not  avoid  drifting  off  into  pure  phantasies. 

These  facts  once  established,  we  ne'^.d  not 


UTOPIAN    AND    SCIENTIFIC  59 

ilwell  a  moment  longer  tipon  this  side  of  the 
question,  now  wholly  belonginj;^  to  the  past. 
We  can  leave  it  to  the  literary  small  fry  to 
solemnly  quibble  over  these  phantasies, 
which  to-clay  only  make  us  smile,  and  to 
crow  over  the  superiority  of  their  own  bald 
reasoning,  as  compared  with  such  "  insan- 
ity." For  ourselves,  we  delight  in  the  stu- 
pendously grand  thoughts  and  germs  of 
thought  that  everywhere  break  out  through 
their  phantastic  covering,  and  to  which  these 
Philistines  are  blind. 

Saint  Simon  was  a  son  of  the  great 
French  Revolution,  at  the  outbreak  of  which 
he  was  not  yet  thirty.  The  Revolution  was 
the  victory  of  the  third  estate,  i.e.,  of  the 
great  masses  of  the  nation,  working  in  pro- 
duction and  in  trade,  over  the  privileged 
idle  classes,  the  nobles  and  the  priests.  But 
the  victory  of  the  third  estate  soon  revealed 
itself  as  exclusively  the  victory  of  a  small 
part  of  this  "  estate,"  as  the  conquest  of  po- 
litical power  by  the  socially  privileged  sec- 
tion of  it,  i.e.,  the  propertied  bourgeoisie. 
And  the  bourgeoisie  had  certainly  developed 
rapidly    during   the    Revolution,    partly   by 


6o  SOCIALISAI 

Speculation  in  the  lands  of  the  nobility  and 
of  the  Church,  confiscated  and  afterwards 
put  up  for  sale,  and  partly  by  frauds  ypon 
the  nation  by  means  of  army  contract«.  It 
was  the  domination  of  these  swindlers  that, 
under  the  Directorate,  brought  France  to 
the  verge  of  ruin,  and  thus  gave  Napoleon 
the  pretext  for  his  coup-d'elat. 

Hence,  to  Saint  Simon  the  antagonism 
between  the  third  estate  and  the  privileged 
classes  took  the  form  of  an  antagonism  be- 
tween "  workers  "  and  "  idlers."  The  id- 
lers were  not  merely  the  old  privileged 
classes,  but  also  all  who,  without  taking  any 
part  in  production  or  distribution,  lived  on 
their  incomes.  And  the  workers  were  not 
only  the  wage-workers,  but  also  the  man- 
ufacturers, the  merchants,  the  bankers. 
That  the  idlers  had  lost  the  capacity  for 
intellectual  leadership  and  political  suprem- 
acy had  been  proved,  and  was  by  the  Rev- 
olution finally  settled.  That  the  non-posses- 
ing  classes  had  not  this  capacity /'seemed  to 
Saint  Simon  proved  by  the  experiences  of 
the  Reign  of  Terror.     Then,  who  was  to// 


UTOPIAN    AND    SCIENTIFIC  01 

lead  and  command  ?  According  to  Saint 
Simon,  science  and  industry,  both  united  by 
a  new  religious  bond,  destined  to  restore 
that  unity  of  religious  ideas  which  had  been 
lost  since  the  time  of  the  Reformation  —  a 
necessarily  mystic  and  rigidly  hierarchic 
"new  Christianity."  But  science,  that  was 
the  scholars;  and  industry,  that  was  in  the 
first  place,  the  working  bourgeois,  manufac- 
turers, merchants,  bankers.  These  bour- 
geoisie were  certainly,  intended  by  Saint 
Simon  to  transform  themselves  into  a  kind 
of  public  officials,  of  social  trustees;  but 
they  were  still  to  hold,  vis-a-vis  of  the  work- 
ers, a  commanding  and  economically  privi- 
leged position.  The  bankers  especially  were 
to  be  called  upon  to  direct  the  whole  of  so- 
cial production  by  the  regulation  of  credit. 
This  conception  was  in  exact  keeping  with  a 
time  in  which  Modern  Industry  in  France 
and,  with  it,  the  chasm  between  bourgeoisie 
and  proletariat  was  only  just  coming  into 
existence.  But  what  Saint  Simon  especially 
lays  stress  upon  is  this :  what  interests  him 
first,  and  above  all  other  things,  is  the  lot 


^2  SOCIALISM , 

of  the  class  that  is  the  most  numerous  and 
the  most  poor  ("  la  classe  la  plus  nombreuse 
et  la  plus  pauvre  " ). 

Already,  in  his  Geneva  letters,  Saint  Si- 
mon lays  down  the  proposition  that  "  all 
men  ought  to  work."     In  the  same  work  he 
*  recognizes  also  that  the  Reign  of  Terror 

'  was  the  reign  of  the  non-possessing  masses. 

\  "  See,"  says  he  to  them,  "  what  happened 

/  in  France  at  the  time  when  your  comrades 
held  sway  there ;  they  brought  about  a  fam- 
ine." But  to  recognize  the  French  Revolu- 
tion as  a  class  war,  and  not  simply  one  be- 
tween nobility  and  bourgeoisie,  but  between, 
nobility,  bourgeoisie,  and  the  non-possessers^ 

1  was,  in  the  year  1802,  a  most  pregnant  dis« 
covery.  In  1816,  he  declares  that  politics 
is  the  science  of  production,  and  foretells  the 
complete  absorption  of  politics  by  econom- 
ics. The  knowledge  that  economic  condi- 
tions are  the  basis  of  political  institutions 
appears  here  only  in  embryo.  Yet  what  is 
here  already  very  plainly  expressed  is  the 
idea  of  the  future  conversion  of  political 
rule  over  men  into  an  administration  of 
things  and  a  direction  of  processes  of  pro- 


UTOPIAN    AND    SCIENTIFIC  63 

duction  —  that  is  to  say,  the  "  abolition  of 
the  State,"  about  which  recently  there  has 
been  so  much  noise. 

Saint  Simon  shows  the  same  superiority 
over  his  contemporaries,  when  in  1814,  im- 
mediately after  the  entry  of  the  allies  into 
Paris,  and  again  in  181 5,  during  the  Hun- 
dred Days'  War,  he  proclaims  the  alliance 
of  France  with  England,  and  then  of  both 
these  countries  with  Germany,  as  the  only 
guarantee  for  the  prosperous  development 
and  peace  of  Europe,  To  preach  to  the 
French  in  181 5  an  alliance  with  the  victors 
of  Waterloo  required  as  much  courage  as 
historical  foresight. 

If  in  Saint  Simon  we  find  a  comprehen- 
sive breadth  of  view,  by  virtue  of  which 
almost  all  the  ideas  of  later  Socialists,  that 
are  not  strictly  economic,  are  found  in  him 
in  embryo,  we  find  in  Fourier  a  criticism  of 
the  existing  conditions  of  society  genuinely 
French  and  witty,  but  not  upon  that  account 
any  the  less  thorougli.  Fourier  takes  the 
bourgeoisie,  their  inspired  prophets  before 
the  Revolution,  and  their  interested  eulo- 
gists after  it,  at  their  own  word.     He  lays 


64  SOCIALISM 

bare  remorsely  the  material  and  moral  mis\ 
^^Z     ery  of  the  bourgeois  world.     He  confronts/ 
it   with    the   earlier   philosophers'    dazzling" 
promises  of  a  society  in  which  reason  alone 
^'       should  reign,  of  a  civiHzation  in  which  hap- 
"^        piness  should  be  universal,  of  an  illimitable 
human    perfectibility,    and   with   the    rose- 
colored  phraseology  of  the  bourgeois  ideolo- 
gists of  his  time.     He  points  out  how  every- 
W'here  the  most  pitiful  reality  corresponds 
with  the  most  high-sounding  phrases,  and 
he  overwhelms  this  hopeless  fiasco  of  phrases 
with  his  mordant  sarcasm. 

Fourier  is  not  only  a  critic ;  his  imperturb- 
ably  serene  nature  makes  him  a  satirist,  and 
assuredly  one  of  the  greatest  satirists  of  all 
.-iV.^  time.  He  depicts,  with  equal  power  and 
'**^  charm,  the  swindling  speculations  that  blos- 
-somed  out  upon  the  downfall  of  the  Revolu- 
tion, and  the  shopkeeping  spirit  prevalent  in, 
and  characteristic  of,  French  commerce  al 
that  time.  Still  more  masterly  is  his  crit 
icism  of  the  bourgeois  form  of  the  relations 
between  the  sexes,  and  the  position  of 
w^oman  in  bourgeois  society.  He  was  the 
first  to  declare  that  in  any  given  society  the 


UTOPIAN    AND    SCIENTIFIC  65 

degree  of  woman's  emancipation  is  the  nat- 
ural measure  of  the  general  emancipation. 

But  Fourier  is  at  his  greatest  in  his  con- 
ception of  the  history  of  society.  He  di- 
vides its  whole  course,  thus  far,  into  four 
stages  of  evolution  —  savagery,  barbarism, 
the  patriarchate,  civilization.  This  last  is 
identical  with  the  so-called  civil,  or  bour- 
geois, society  of  to-day  —  i.e.,  with  the  so- 
cial order  that  came  in  with  the  sixteenth 
century.  He  proves  "  that  the  civilized 
stage  raises  every  vice  practiced  by  barbar- 
ism in  a  simple  fashion,  into  a  form  of  ex- 
istence, complex,  ambiguous,  equivocal,  hyp- 
ocritical " —  that  civilization  moves  in  "  a 
vicious  circle,"  in  contradictions  which  it 
constantly  reproduces  without  being  able 
to  solve  them ;  hence  it  constantly  arrives  at 
the  very  opposite  to  that  which  it  wants  to 
attain,  or  pretends  to  want  to  attain,  so  that, 
e,  g.,  "  under  civilization  poverty  is  born  of 
superabundance  itself." 

Fourier,  as  we  see,  uses  the  dialectic 
method  in  the  same  masterly  way  as  his  con- 
temporary Hegel.  Using  these  same  dia- 
lectics,  he  argues,   against   the   talk   about 


66  SOCIALISM 

illimitable  human  perfectibility  that  every 
historical  phase  has  its  period  of  ascent 
and  also  its  period  of  descent,  and  he  ap- 
plies this  observation  to  the  future  of  the 
whole  human  race.  As  Kant  introduced 
into  natural  science  the  idea  of  the  ultimate 
destruction  of  the  earth,  Fourier  introduced 
into  historical  science  that  of  the  ultimate 
destruction  of  the  human  race. 

Whilst  in  France  the  hurricane  of  the 
Revolution  swept  over  the  land,  in  England 
a  quieter,  but  not  on  that  account  less  tre- 
mendous, revolution  was  going  on.  Steani 
and  the  new  tool-making  machinery  were 
transforming  manufacture  into  modern  in- 
dustry, and  thus  revolutionizing  the  whole 
foundation  of  bourgeois  society.  The  slug- 
gish march  of  development  of  the  manufac- 
turing period  changed  into  a  veritable  storm 
and  stress  period  of  production.  With  con- 
stantly increasing  swiftness  the  splitting-up 
of  society  into  large  capitalists  and  non-pos- 
sessing proletarians  went  on.  Between 
these,  instead  of  the  former  stable  middle- 
class,  an  unstable  mass  of  artisans  and  small 
shopkeepers,  the  most  fluctuating  portion  of 


UTOPIAN    AND    SCIENTIFIC  67 

the  population,  now  led  a  precarious  ex- 
istence. . 

The  new  mode  of  production  was,  as  yet, 
only  at  the  beginning  of  its  period  of  ascent ; 
as  yet  it  was  the  normal,  regular  method 
of  production  —  the  only  one  possible  un- 
der existing  conditions.  Nevertheless,  even 
then  it  was  producing  crying  social  abuses  — 
the  herding  together  of  a  homeless  popula- 
tion in  the  worst  quarters  of  the  large  towns; 
the  loosening  of  all  traditional  moral  bonds, 
of  patriarchal  subordination,  of  family  rela- 
tions; overwork,  especially  of  women  and 
children,  to  a  frightful  extent;  complete  de- 
moralization of  the  working-class,  suddenly 
flung  into  altogether  new  conditions,  from 
the  country  into  the  town,  from  agriculture 
into  modern  industry,  from  stable  conditions 
of  existence  into  insecure  ones  that  changed 
from  day  to  day. 

At  this  juncture  there  came  forward  as 
a  reformer  a  manufacturer  29  years  old  — 
a  man  of  almost  sublime,  childlike  simplicity 
of  character,  and  at  the  same  time  one  of 
the  few  born  leaders  of  men.  Robert  Owen 
had  adopted  the  teaching  of  the  materialistic 


68  SOCIALISM 

philosophers:  that  man's  character  is  the 
product,  on  the  one  hand,  of  heredity,  on 
the  other,  of  the  environment  of  the  indi- 
vidual during  his  lifetime,  and  especially 
during  his  period  of  development.  In  the 
industrial  revolution  most  of  his  class  saw 
only  chaos  and  confusion,  and  the  oppor- 
tunity of  fishing  in  these  troubled  waters 
and  making  large  fortunes  quickly.  He 
saw  in  it  the  opportunity  of  putting  into 
practice  his  favorite  theory,  and  so  of  bring- 
ing order  out  of  chaos.  He  had  already  tried 
it  with  success,  as  superintendent  of  more 
than  five  hundred  men  in  a  Manchester  fac- 
tory. From  1800  to  1829,  he  directed  the 
great  cotton  mill  at  New  Lanark,  in  Scot- 
land, as  managing  partner,  along  the  same 
lines,  but  with  greater  freedom  of  action 
and  with  a  success  that  made  him  a  Euro- 
pean reputation.  A  population,  originally 
consisting  of  the  most  diverse  and,  for  the 
most  part,  very  demoralized  elements,  a 
population  that  gradually  grew  tQ  2,500, 
he  turned  into  a  model  colony,  in  which 
drunkenness,  police,  magistrate^,  Jawsuits, 
poor  laws,   charity,   wer^  '«nknown,     And 


UTOPIAN    AND    SCIENTIFIC  69 

all  this  simply  by  placing  the  people  in 
conditions  worthy  of  human  beings,  and 
especially  by  carefully  bringing  up  the 
rising  generation.  He  was  the  founder  of 
infant  schools,  and  introduced  them  first 
at  New  Lanark.  At  the  age  of  two  the 
children  came  to  school,  where  they  en- 
joyed themselves  so  much  that  they  could 
scarcely  be  got  home  again.  Whilst  his 
competitors  worked  their  people  thirteen 
or  fourteen  hours  a  day,  in  New  Lanark 
the  working-day  was  only  ten  and  a  half 
hours.  When  a  crisis  in  cotton  stopped 
work  for  four  months,  his  workers  received 
their  full  wages  all  the  time.  And  with 
all  this  the  business  more  than  doubled  in 
value,  and  to  the  last  yielded  large  profits 
to  its  proprietors. 

In  spite  of  all  this,  Owen  was  not  con- 
tent. The  existence  which  he  secured  for 
his  workers  was,  in  his  eyes,  still  far  from 
being  worthy  of  human  beings.  "  The 
people  were  slaves  at  my  mercy."  The 
relatively  favorable  conditions  in  which  he 
had  placed  them  were  still  far  from  allow- 
ing a  rational  development  of  the  character 


70  SOCIALISM 

and  of  the  intellect  in  all  directions,  much 
less  of  the  free  exercise  of  all  their  facul- 
ties. "  And  yet,  the  working  part  of  this 
population  of  2,500  persons  was  daily  pro- 
ducing as  much  real  wealth  for  society  as, 
less  than  half  a  century  before,  it  would 
have  required  the  working-  part  of  a  pop- 
ulation of  600,000  to  create.  I  asked  my- 
self, what  became  of  the  difference  between 
the  wealth  consumed  by  2,500  persons  and 
that  which  would  have  been  consumed  by 
600,000?  "  ^ 

The  answer  was  clear.  It  had  been  used 
to  pay  the  proprietors  of  the  establishment 
5  per  cent,  on  the  capital  they  had  laid  out, 
in  addition  to  over  £300,000  clear  profit. 
And  that  which  held  for  New  Lanark  held 
to  a  still  greater  extent  for  all  the  factories, 
in  England.  "  If  this  new  wealth  had  not 
been  created  by  machinery,  imperfectly  as 
it  has  been  applied,  the  wars  of  Europe, 
in  opposition  to  Napoleon,  and  to  support 

^  From  "  The  Revolution  in  Mind  and  Practice,"  p.  21, 
a  memorial  addressed  to  all  the  "red  Republicans,  Commu- 
nists and  Socialists  of  Europe,"  and  sent  to  the  provisional 
government  of  France,  1848,  and  also  "to  Queen  Victoria 
and   her   responsible   advisers." 


UTOPIAN    AND    SCIENTIFIC  7I 

the  aristocratic  principles  of  society,  could 
not  have  been  maintained.  And  yet  this 
new  power  was  the  creation  of  the  work- 
ing-classes.'' ^  To  them,  therefore,  the 
fruits  of  this  new  power  belonged.  The 
newly-created  gigantic  productive  forces, 
hitherto  used  only  to  enrich  individuals  and 
to  enslave  the  masses,  offered  to  Owen  the 
foundations  for  a  reconstruction  of  society; 
they  were  destined,  as  the  common  prop- 
erty of  all,  to  be  worked  for  the  common 
good  of  all. 

Owen's  Communism  was  based  upon  this 
purely  business  foundation,  the  outcome, 
so  to  say,  of  commercial  calculation. 
Throughout,  it  maintained  this  practical 
character.  Thus,  in  1823,  Owen  proposed 
the  relief  of  the  distress  in  Ireland  by 
Communist  colonies,  and  drew  up  complete 
estimates  of  costs  of  founding  them,  yearly 
expenditure,  and  probable  revenue.  And 
in  his  definite  plan  for  the  future,  the  tech- 
nical working  out  of  details  is  managed 
with  such  practical  knowledge  —  ground 
plan,   front   and   side   and  bird's-eye  views 

*  Note,    1.    c,    p.    70. 


72  SOCIALISM 

all  included  —  that  the  Owen  method  of 
social  reform  once  accepted,  there  is  frora 
the  practical  point  of  view  little  to  be  said 
against  the  actual  arrangement  of  details. 
His  advance  in  the  direction  of  Commun- 
ism was  the  turning-point  in  Owen's  life. 
As  long  as  he  was  simply  a  philanthropist, 
he  was  rewarded  with  nothing  but  wealth, 
applause,  honor,  and  glory.  He  was  the 
most  popular  man  in  Europe.  Not  only 
men  of  his  own  class,  but  statesmen  and 
princes  listened  to  him  approvingly.  But 
when  he  came  out  with  his  Communist 
theories,  that  was  quite  another  thing. 
Three  great  obstacles  seemed  to  him  es- 
pecially to  block  the  path  to  social  reform: 
private  property,  religion,  the  present  form 
of  marriage.  He  knew  what  confronted 
him  if  he  attacked  these  —  outlawry,  ex- 
communication from  official  society,  the  loss 
of  his  whole  social  position.  But  nothing 
of  this  prevented  him  from  attacking  them 
without  fear  of  consequences,  and  what  he 
had  foreseen  happened.  Banished  from 
official  society,  with  a  conspiracy  of  silence 
against    him   in    the    press,    ruined   by   his 


UTOPIAN    AND    SCIENTIFIC  73 

unsuccessful  Communist  experiments  in 
America,  in  which  he  sacrificed  all  his  for- 
tune, he  turned  directly  to  the  working-class 
and  continued  working  in  their  midst  for 
thirty  years.  Every  social  movement,  every 
real  advance  in  England  on  behalf  of  the 
workers  links  itself  on  to  the  name  of  Rob- 
ert Owen.  He  forced  through  in  1819, 
after  five  years'  fighting,  the  first  law  limit- 
ing the  hours  of  labor  of  women  and  chil- 
dren in  factories.  He  was  president  of  the 
first  Congress  at  which  all  the  Trade  Unions 
of  England  united  in  a  single  great  trade 
association.  He  introduced  as  transition 
measures  to  the  complete  communistic  or- 
ganization of  society,  on  the  one  hand,  co- 
operative societies  for  retail  trade  and  pro- 
duction. These  have  since  that  time,  at 
least,  given  practical  proof  that  the  merchant 
and  the  manufacturer  are  socially  quite  un- 
necessary. On  the  other  hand,  he  intro- 
duced labor  bazaars  for  the  exchange  of 
the  ])roducts  of  labor  through  the  medium 
of  labor-notes,  whose  unit  was  a  single  hour 
of  work;  institutions  necessarily  doomed  to 
failure,  but  completely  anticipating  Proud- 


74  SOCIALISM 

hon's   bank  of  exchange  of  a  much  later 
period,  and  differing  entirely  from  this  in 
that  it  did  not  claim  to  be  the  panacea  for 
all  social  ills,  but  only  a  first  step  towards 
a  much  more  radical  revolution  of  society. 
The  Utopians'  mode  of  thought  has  for 
a   long   time   governed    the   socialist    ideas 
of  the  nineteenth  century,  and  still  governs 
|iSome    of    them.      Until    very    recently    all 
French  and  English  Socialists  did  homage 
to  it.     The  earlier  German  Communism,  in- 
cluding* that  of  Weitling,  was  of  the  same 
school.     To  all  these  Socialism  is  the  ex- 
pression of  absolute  truth,  reason,  and  jus- 
I  tice,  and  has  only  to  be  discovered  to  con- 
,  quer   all   the   world   by  virtue  of   its   own 
/  power.     And  as  absolute  truth  is  independ- 
'  ?nt   of  time,    space,    and   of   the   historical 
development  of  man,  it  is  a  mere  accident 
••vhen  and  where  it  is  discovered.     With  all 
this,  absolute  truth,  reason,  and  justice  are 
different  with  the  founder  of  each  different 
school.     And  as  each  one's  special  kind  of 
absolute  truth,  reason,  and  justice  is  again 
conditioned  by  his  subjective  understanding, 
.  his  conditions  of  existence,  the  measure  of 


UTOPIAN    AND    SCIENTIFIC  75 

his  knowledge  and  his  intellectual  ix^aining, 

there   is   no   other   ending  possible   in   this 

conflict   of   absolute   truths   than   that  they 

shall  be  mutually  exclusive  one  of  the  other. 

Hence,  from  this  nothing  could  come  but  a 

kind  of  eclectic,  average  Socialism,  which, 

as  a  matter  of  fact,  has  up  to  the  present 

time  dominated  the  minds  of  most  of  the 

socialist  workers   in   France  and   England. 

Hence,  a  mish-mash  allowing  of  the  most 

.'■  manifold  shades  of  opinion ;  a  mish-mash  of 

'    such  critical  statements,  economic  theories, 

y  pictures  of  future  society  by  the  founders 

of  different  sects,  as  excite  a  minimum  of 

opposition;  a  mish-mash  which  is  the  more 

easily  brewed  the  more  the  definite  sharp 

edges    of    the    individual    constituents    are 

rubbed  down  in  the  stream  of  debate,  like 

rounded  pebbles  in  a  brook. 

/      To  make  a  science  of  Socialism,  it  had 

\  first  to  be  placed  upon  a  real  basis. 


76  SOCIALISM 


II 


In  the  meantime,  along  with  and  after 
the  French  philosophy  of  the  eighteenth 
century  had  arisen  the  new  German  phi- 
losophy, culminating  in  Hegel.  Its  greatest 
merit  was  the  taking  up  again  of  dialectics 
as  the  highest  form  of  reasoning.  The  old 
Greek  philosophers  were  all  born  natural 
dialecticians,  and  Aristotle,  the  most  en- 
cyclopaedic intellect  of  them,  had  already 
analyzed  the  most  essential  forms  of  dialec- 
tic thought.  The  newer  philosophy,  on  the 
other  hand,  although  in  it  also  dialectics  had 
brilliant  exponents  {e.  g.  Descartes  and  Spi- 
noza), had,  especially  through  English  in- 
fluence, become  more  and  more  rigidly  fixed 
in  the  so-called  metaphysical  mode  of  reason- 
ing, by  which  also  the  French  of  the  eigh- 
teenth century  were  almost  wholly  dom- 
inated, at  all  events  in  their  special  philo- 
sophical work.  Outside  philosophy  in  the 
restricted    sense,    the    French    nevertheless 


UTOPIAN    AND    SCIENTIFIC  "^"J 

produced  masterpieces  of  dialectic.  We 
need  only  call  to  mind  Diderot's  "  Le 
Neveu  de  Rameau,"  and  Rousseau's  "  Dis- 
cours sur  I'origine  et  les  fondements  de 
rinegalite  parmi  les  hommes."  We  give 
here,  in  brief,  the  essential  character  of  these 
two  modes  of  thought. 

When  we  consider  and  reflect  upon  na- 
ture at  large,  or  the  history  of  mankind» 
or  our  own  intellectual  activity,  at  first  we 
see  the  picture  of  an  endless  entanglement 
of  relations  and  reactions,  permutations 
and  combinations,  in  which  nothing  remains 
what,  where,  and  as  it  was,  but  everything 
moves,  changes,  comes  into  being  and  passes 
away.  We  see,  therefore,  at  first  the  picture 
as  a  whole,  with  its  individual  parts  still 
more  or  less  kept  in  the  background;  we 
observe  the  movements,  transitions,  connec- 
tions, rather  than  the  things  that  move, 
combine,  and  are  connected.  This  primitive, 
naive,  but  intrinsically  correct  conception 
of  the  world  is  that  of  ancient  Greek  phi- 
losophy, and  was  first  clearly  formulated  by 
Heraclitus :  everything  is  and  is  not.  for 
everything  is  fluid,  is  constantly  changing, 


78  SOCIALISM 

constantly  coming  into  being  and  passing 
away. 

But  this  conception,  correctly  as  it  ex- 
presses the  general  character  of  the  picture 
of  appearances  as  a  whole,  does  not  suffice 
to  explain  the  details  of  which  this  picture 
is  made  up,  and  so  long  as  we  do  not  under- 
stand these,  we  have  not  a  clear  idea  of  the 
whole  picture.  In  order  to  understand  these 
details  we  must  detach  them  from  their 
natural  or  historical  connection  and  ex- 
amine each  one  separately,  its  nature,  special 
causes,  effects,  etc.  This  is,  primarily,  the 
task  of  natural  science  and  historical  re- 
search ;  branches  of  science  which  the  Greeks 
of  classical  times,  on  very  good  grounds, 
relegated  to  a  subordinate  position,  because 
they  had  first  of  all  to  collect  materials 
for  these  sciences  to  work  upon.  A  certain 
amount  of  natural  and  historical  material 
must  be  collected  before  there  can  be  any 
critical  analysis,  comparison,  and  arrange- 
ment in  classes,  orders,  and  species.  The 
foundations  of  the  exact  natural  sciences 
were,  therefore,  first  worked  out  by  the 
Greeks  of  the  Alexandrian  period,  and  later 


UTOPIAN    AND    SCIENTIFIC  79 

on,  in  the  Middle  Ages,  by  the  Arabs,  Real 
natural  science  dates  from  the  second  half 
of  the  fifteenth  century,  and  thence  onward 
it  has  advanced  with  constantly  increasing- 
rapidity.  The  analysis  of  Nature  into  its 
individual  parts,  the  grouping  of  the  differ- 
ent natural  processes  and  objects  in  definite 
classes,  the  study  of  the  internal  anatomy 
of  organized  bodies  in  their  manifold  forms 
—  these  were  the  fundamental  conditions 
of  the  gigantic  strides  in  our  knowledge  of 
Nature  that  have  been  made  during  the  last 
four  hundred  years.  But  this  method  of 
work  has  also  left  us  as  legacy  the  habit  of 
observing  natural  objects  and  processes  in 
isolation,  apart  from  their  connection  with 
the  vast  whole ;  of  observing  them  in  repose, 
not  in  motion ;  as  constants,  not  as  essen- 
tially variables ;  in  their  death,  not  in  their 
life.  And  when  this  way  of  looking  at 
things  was  transferred  by  Bacon  and  Locke 
from  natural  science  to  philosophy,  it  begot 
the  narrow,  metaphysical  mode  of  thought 
peculiar  to  the  last  century. 

To  the  metaphysician,   things   and  their 
mental  reflexes,  ideas,  are  isolated,  are  to  be 


8o  SOCIALISM 

considered  one  after  the  other  and  apart 
from  each  other,  are  objects  of  investiga 
tion  fixed,  rigid,  given  once  for  all.  He 
thinks  in  absolutely  irreconcilable  antitheses. 
"  His  communication  is  '  yea,  yea ;  nay. 
nay ; '  for  whatsoever  is  more  than  these 
Cometh  of  evil."  For  him  a  thing  either 
exists  or  does  not  exist;  a  thing  cannot  at 
the  same  time  be  itself  and  something  else. 
Positive  and  negative  absolutely  exclude 
one  another;  cause  and  effect  stand  in  a 
rigid  antithesis  one  to  the  other. 

At  first  sight  this  mode  of  thinking  seems 
to  us  very  luminous,  because  it  is  that  of 
so-called  sound  commonsense.  Only  sound 
commonsense,  respectable  fellow  that  he  is, 
in  the  homely  realm  of  his  own  four  walls 
has  very  wonderful  adventures  directly  he 
ventures  out  into  the  wide  world  of  research. 
And  the  metaphysical  mode  of  thought,  jus- 
tifiable and  necessary  as  it  is  in  a  number 
of  domains  whose  extent  varies  according 
to  the  nature  of  the  particular  object  of 
investigation,  sooner  or  later  reaches  a  limit, 
beyond  which  it  becomes  one-sided,  re- 
stricted, abstract,  lost  in  insoluble  contradic- 


UTOPIAN    AND    SCIENTIFIC  8l 

tions.  In  the  contemplation  of  individual 
things,  it  forgets  the  connection  between 
them;  in  the  contemplation  of  their  exist- 
ence, it  forgets  the  beginning  and  end  of 
that  existence;  of  their  repose,  it  forgets 
their  motion.  It  cannot  see  the  wood  fo. 
the  trees. 

For  everyday  purposes  we  know  and  can 
say  e.  g.,  whether  an  animal  is  alive  or  not. 
But,  upon  closer  inquiry,  we  find  that  this 
is,  in  many  cases,  a  very  complex  question, 
as  the  jurists  know  very  well.  They  have 
cudgelled  their  brains  in  vain  to  discover 
a  rational  limit  beyond  which  the  killing  of 
the  child  in  its  mother's  womb  is  murder. 
It  is  just  as  impossible  to  determine  abso- 
lutely the  moment  of  death,  for  physiology 
proves  that  death  is  not  an  instantaneous, 
momentary  phenomenon,  but  a  very  pro- 
tracted process. 

In  like  manner,  every  organized  being  is 
every  moment  the  same  and  not  the  same; 
every  moment  it  assimilates  matter  supplied 
from  without,  and  gets  rid  of  other  matter; 
every  moment  some  cells  of  its  body  die 
and    others    build    themselves    anew ;    in    a 


82  SOCIALISM 

longer  or  shorter  time  the  matter  of  its 
body  is  completely  renewed,  and  is  replaced 
by  other  molecules  of  matter,  so  that  every 
organized  being  is  always  itself,  and  yet 
.sometliing  other  than  itself. 

Further,  we  find  upon  closer  investigation 
that  the  two  poles  of  an  antithesis,  positive 
and  negative,  e.  g.,  are  as  inseparable  as  they 
are  opposed,  and  that  despite  all  their  oppo- 
sition, they  mutually  interpeneti'ate.  And 
we  find,  in  like  manner,  that  cause  and 
effect  are  conceptions  which  only  hold  good 
in  their  application  to  individual  casfes;  but 
as  soon  as  we  consider  the  individual  cases 
in  their  general  connection  with  the  universe 
as  a  whole,  they  run  into  each  other,  and 
they  become  confounded  when  we  contem- 
plate that  universal  action  and  reaction  in 
which  causes  and  effects  are  eternally  chang- 
ing places,  so  that  what  is  effect  here  an,d 
now  will  be  cause  there  and  then,  and  vice 
versa. 

None  of  these  processes  and  modes  ot 
thought  enters  into  the  framework  of  meta- 
physical reasoning.  Dialectics,  on  the  other 
hand,  comprehends  things  and  their  repre- 


UTOPIAN    AND    SCIENTIFIC  83 

^.entations,  ideas,   in  their  essential  connec- '; 
/ion,  concatenation,  motion,  origin,  and  end- 
ing.     Such    processes    as    those   mentioned 
above  are,  therefore,  so  many  corroborations 
of  its  own  method  of  procedure. 

,  Nature  is  the  proof  of  dialectics,  and  it 
must  be  said  for  modern  science  that  it 
has  furnished  this  proof  with  very  rich 
materials  increasing  daily,  and  thus  has 
shown  that,  in  the  last  resort,  Nature  works 
dialectically  and  not  metaphysically;  that 
she  does  not  move  in  the  eternal  oneness 
of  a  perpetually  recurring  circle,  but  goes 
through  a  real  historical  evolution.  In  this 
connection  Darwin  must  be  named  before 
all  others.  He  dealt  the  metaphysical  con- 
ception of  Nature  the  heaviest  blow  by  his 
proof  that  all  organic  beings,  plants,  ani- 
mals, and  man  himself,  are  the  products  of 
a  process  of  evolution  going  on  through 
millions  of  years.  But  the  naturalists  who 
have  learned  to  think  dialectically  are  few 
and  far  between,  and  this  conflict  of  the 
results  of  discovery  with  preconceived 
moihes  of  thinking  explains  the  endless  con- 
fusion now  reigning  in  theoretical  natural 


84  SOCIALISM 

science,  the  despair  of  teachers  as  well  as 
learners,  of  authors  and  readers  alike. 

An  exact  representation  of  the  universe, 
)f  its  evolution,  of  the  development  of  man- 
kind, and  of  the  reflection  of  this  evolution 
in  the  minds  of  men,  can  therefore  only  be 
obtained  by  the  methods  of  dialectics  with 
its  constant  regard  to  the  innumerable 
actions  and  reactions  of  life  and  death,  of 
progressive  or  retrogressive  changes.  And 
in  this  spirit  the  new  German  philosophy 
has  worked.  Kant  began  his  career  by 
resolving  the  stable  solar  system  of  Newton 
and  its  eternal  duration,  after  the  famous 
initial  impulse  had  once  been  given,  into 
the  result  of  a  historic  process,  the  forma- 
tion of  the  sun  and  all  the  planets  out  of 
a  rotating  nebulous  mass.  From  this  he  at 
the  same  time  drew  the  conclusion  that, 
given  this  origin  of  the  solar  system,  its 
future  death  followed  of  necessity.  His 
theory  half  a  century  later  was  established 
mathematically  by  Laplace,  and  half  a  cen- 
tury after  that  the  spectroscope  proved  the 
existence    in    space    of    such    incandescent 


UTOPIAN    AND    SCIENTIFIC  85 

masses  of  gas  in  various  stages  of  conden- 
sation. 

This  new  German  philosophy  cuhninated 
in  the  Hegehan  S3fstem.  In  this  system  — 
and  herein  is  its  great  merit  —  for  the  first 
time  the  Avhole  world,  natural,  historical, 
intellectual,  is  represented  as  a  process,  i.  e., 
as  in  constant  motion,  change,  transforma- 
tion, development;  and  the  attempt  is  made 
to  trace  out  the  internal  connection  that 
makes  a  continuous  whole  of  all  this  move- 
ment and  development.  From  this  point 
of  view  the  history  of  mankind  no  longer 
appeared  as  a  wild  whirl  of  senseless  deeds 
of  violence,  all  equally  condemnable  at  the 
judgment  seat  of  mature  philosophic  reason, 
and  which  are  best  forgotten  as  quickly  as 
possible;  but  as  the  process  of  evolution 
of  man  himself.  It  was  now  the  task  of 
the  intellect  to  follow  the  gradual  march  of 
this  process  through  all  its  devious  ways, 
and  to  trace  out  the  inner  law  running 
through  all  its  apparently  accidental  phe- 
nomena. 

That  the  Hegelian  system  did  not  solve 


86  SOCIALISM 

the  problem  it  propounded  is  here  imma- 
terial. Its  epoch-making  merit  was  that  it 
propounded  the  problem.  This  problem  is 
one  that  no  single  individual  will  ever  be 
able  to  solve.  Although  Hegel  was  —  with 
Saint  Simon  —  the  most  encyclopcedic  mind 
of  his  time,  3'et  he  was  limited,  first,  by 
the  necessarily  limited  extent  of  his  own 
knowledge,  and,  second,  by  the  limited  ex- 
tent and  depth  of  the  knowledge  and  con- 
ceptions of  his  age.  To  these  limits  a  third  . 
must  be  added.  Hegel  vras  an  idealist.  To^ 
him  the  thoughts  within  his  brain  were 
not  the  more  or  less  abstract  pictures  of 
actual  things  and  processes,  but,  conversely, 
things  and  their  evolution  were  only  the 
realized  pictures  of  the  "  Idea,"  existing 
somewhere  from  eternity  before  the  world 
was.  This  way  of  thinking  turned  every- 
thing upside  down,  and  completely  reversed 
the  actual  connection  of  things  in  the  world. 
Correctly  and  ingeniously  as  many  indi- 
vidual groups  of  facts  were  grasped  by 
Hegel,  yet,  for  the  reasons  just  given,  there 
is  much  that  is  botched,  artificial,  labored, 
in  a  word,  wrong  in  point  of  detail.     The 


UTOPIAN    AND    SCIENTIFIC  8/ 

Hegelian   system,   in   itself,  was  a  colossa^ 
miscarriage  —  but  it   was   also  the  last  of ^ 

(its  kind.      It   was  suffering,   in   fact,   from 
an    internal    and    incurable    contradiction. 
Upon  the  one  hand,  lits  essenlial  propp_sjtion„ 
was  the  conception  that  human  history  is 
a  process  of  evolutign,  which,  by  its  very 
nature,  cannot  find  its  i :i t e  1 1 ec tual  finaljerm 
Ln  the   i:i:.cu\cry  «-f  ariy  sri-called  absolute 
truth.     But,  on  the  other  hand,  it  laid  claim 
to  being  the  very  essencg__oi_,t.his_.  absoliLte. 
IjivvithT  JK  system  of  natural  and  historical 
If  Imowledge,  enibracing  everythiiig,  aad-final 
\\  for  all  time,  is  a  contradictioaJQ-tlie  fu»d^-' ' 
CMimental    law    of   dialectic    reasoning^:X^his 
*^'  law,  indeed,  by  no  means  excludes,  but,  on 
the  contrary,  includes  the  idea  that  the  sys- 
tematic knowledge  of  the  external  uoiv-fec^e 
can  make  giant  strides  from  age  to  age^)> 

The  perception  of  the  fundamental  con- 
tradiction in  German  idealism  led  neces- 
sarily back  to  materialism,  but  nota  bene, 
not  to  the  simply  metaphysical,  exclusively 
mechanical  materialism  of  the  eighteenth 
century.  Old  materialism  looked  upon  all 
previous  history  as  a  crude  heap  of  irration- 


öö  SOCIALISM 

ality  and  violence;  modern  materialism  sees 
in  it  the  process  of  evolution  of  humanity, 
and  aims  at  discovering  the  laws  thereof. 
With  the  French  of  the  eighteenth  century, 
and  even  with  Hegel,  the  conception  ob- 
tained of  Nature  as  a  whole,  moving  in 
narrow  circles,  and  forever  immutable,  with 
its  eternal  celestial  bodies,  as  Newton,  and 
unalterable  organic  species,  as  Linnaeus, 
taught.  Modern  materialism  embraces  the 
more  recent  discoveries  of  natural  science, 
according  to  which  Nature  also  has  its  his- 
tory in  time,  the  celestial  bodies,  like  the 
organic  species  that,  under  favorable  con- 
ditions,  people  them,  being  born  and  perish- 
ing.  And  even  if  Nature,  as  a  w^hole,  must 
still  be  said  to  move  in  recurrent  cycles, 
these  cycles  assume  infinitely  larger  dimen- 
sions. In  both  aspects,  modern  materialism 
IS  essentially  dialectic,  and  no  longer  re.-.. 
quires  the  assistance  of  that  sort  of  phjlosp- 
phy  which,  queen-lik.e,  pretended  to.  rule 
the  remaining  mob  of  sciences.  As  soon 
as  each  special  science  is  bound  to  make 
clear  its  position  in  the  great  totality  of 
thiuQ-s  and  of  our  knowledge  of  things,  a 


UTOPIAN    AND    SCIENTIFIC  89 

special  science  dealincf  u'ith  this  totality  is 
superfluous  or  unnecessary.  That  which 
still  survives  of  all  earlier  philosophy  is 
the  science  of  thought  and  its  laws  — 
formal  logic  and  dialectics.  Everything" 
else  is  subsumed  in  the  positive  science  of 
Nature  and  history. 

Whilst,  however,  the  revolution  in  the 
conception  of  Nature  could  only  be  made  in 
proportion  to  the  corresponding  positive 
materials    furnished    by    research,    already 

Anuch  earlier  certain  historical  facts  had  oc- 
\  curred  which  led  to  a  decisive  change   m 

■  the  conception  of  history.  In  1831,  the  first 
working-class  rising  took  place  in  Lyons; 
between  1838  and  1842,  the  first  national 
working-class  movement,  that  of  the  Eng- 
lish Chartists,  reached  its  height.  The  class 
struggle  between  proletariat  and  bourgeoisie 
came  to  the  front  in  the  history  of  the  most 
advanced  countries  in  Europe,  in  proportion 
to  the  development,  upon  the  one  hand,  of 
modern  industry,  upon  the  other,  of  the 
newly-acquired  political  supremacy  of  the 
bourgeoisie.  Facts  more  and  more  strenu- 
ously gave  the  lie  to  the  teachings  of  bour- 


90  SOCIALISM 

geois  economy  as  to  the  identity  of  the 
interests  of  capital  and  labor,  as  to  the 
universal  harmony  and  universal  prosperity 
that  would  be  the  consequence  of  unbridled 
competition.  All  these  things  could  no 
longer  be  ignored,  any  more  than  the 
French  and  English  Socialism,  which  was 
their  theoretical,  though  very  imperfect,  ex- 
pression. But  the  old  ideajist  ^conception 
of  liistory,  which  was  not  yet  dislodged, 
knew  nothing  of  class  struggles  based  upon 
economic  interests,  knew  nothing  of  eco- 
inomic  interests;  production  and  all  eco- 
momic  relations  appeared  in  it  only  as 
incidental,  subordinate  elements  in  the  "  his- 
tory of  civilization." 

The  new   facts  made  imperative  a  new 
examination  of  all  past   history.     Then  it 

was    seen    that   all   past   history,    with   the 
^  ...... 

^  f  exception  of  its  primitive  stages,   was  the 

history  of  class  struggles;  that  these  war- 
ring classes  of  society  are  always  the  prod- 
ucts of  the  modes  of  production  and  of 
exchange  —  in  a  word,  of  the  economic 
conditions  of  their  time;  that  the  economic 
structure   of   society   always   furnishes   the 


UTOPIAN    AND    SCIENTIFIC  9 1 

real  basis,  starting  from  which  we  can  alone 
work  out   the  ultimate  explanation  of  the 
whole  superstructure  of  juridical  and  polit- 
ical institutions  as  well  as  of  the  religious, 
philosophical,    and  other   ideas  of  a  given 
historical  period.     Hegel  had  freed  history 
from  metaphysics  —  he  had  made  it  dialec- 
tic; but  his  conception  of  history  was  essen-  ' 
tially    idealistic.      But    now    idealism    was 
driven  from  its  last  refuge,  the  philosppby 
of   history ;   now   a   materialistic-  treatment  ; 
of  history  was  propounded,  and  a  method , 
found  of  explaining  man's  "  knowing  "  by 
his  "  being,"  instead  of,  as  heretofore,  his 
"  being  "  by  his  "  knowing." 

From  that  time  forward  Socialism  was 
no  longer  an  accidental  discovery  of  this  or 
that  ingenious  brain,  but  the  necessary  out- 
come of  the  struggle  between  two  histor- 
ically developed  classes  —  the  proletariat 
and  the  bourgeoisie.  .Its  task  was  no  longer 
to  manufacture  a  system  of  society  as  perfect 
as  possible,  but  to  examine  the  historico- 
economic  succession  of  events  from  which 
these  classes  and  their  antagonism  had  of 
necessity    sprung,    and   to    discover    in   the 


•92  SOCIALISM 

€Conomic  conditions  thus  created  the  means 
of  ending  the  conflict.  But  the  SociaHsm 
of  eadier  days  was  as  incompatible  with 
this  materiahstic  conception  as  the  concep- 
tion of  Nature  of  the  French  materialists 
was  with  dialectics  and  modern  natural  sci- 
ence. The  Socialism  of  earlier  days  cer- 
tainly criticised  the  existing  capitalistic 
mode  of  production  and  its  consequences. 
But  it  could  not  explain  them,  and,  there- 
fore, could  not  get  the  mastery  of  them.  It 
■could  only  simply  reject  them  as  bad.  The 
more  strongly  this  earlier  Socialism  de- 
nounced the  exploitation  of  the  working- 
class,  inevitable  under  Capitalism,  the  less 
able  was  it  clearly  to  show  in  what  this 
•exploitation  consisted  and  how  it  arose. 
But  for  this  it  was  necessary  —  ( i )  to 
present  the  capitalistic  method  of  production 
in  its  historical  connection  and  its  inev.- 
itableness  during  a  particular  historical  , 
period,  and  therefore,  also,  to  present  its 
•inevitable  downfall "Ji  and  (2)  to  lay  bare 
its  essential  character,  which  was  still  a 
secret.  This  was  done  by  tlie  discovery  of 
surplus-value.    It  was  showi'i  that  the  appro- 


UTOPIAN    AND    SCIENTIFIC  93 

priation  of  unpaid  labor  is  the  basis  of  the 
capitalist  mode  of  production  and  of  the 
exploitation  of  the  worker  that  occurs  under 
it;  that  even  if  the  capitalist  buys  the  labor- 
power  of  his  laborer  at  its  full  value  as  a 
commodity  on  the  market,  he  yet  extracts 
more  value  from  it  than  he  paid  for;  and 
that  in  the  ultimate  analysis  this  surplus- 
value  forms  those  sums  of  value  from  which 
are  heaped  up  the  constantly  increasing- 
masses  of  capital  in  the  hands  of  the  pos- 
sessing classes.  The  genesis  of  capitalist 
production  and  the  production  of  capital 
were  both  explained. 

These  two  great  discoveries,  the  material- 
istic conception  of  history  and  the  revelation 
of  the  secret  of  capitalistic  production 
through  surplus-value,  we  owe  to  Marx. 
With  these  discoveries  Socialism  became  a 
science.  The  next  thing  was  to  work  out 
all  its  details  and  relations. 


^^ 


94  SOCIALISM 


( 


III 

Pf  The  materialist  conception  of  history 
■"starts  from  the  proposition  that  the  produc- 
:Vtion  of  the  means  to  support  human  life 
I  and,  next  to  production,  the  exchange  of 
'  things  produced,  is  the  basis  of  all  social 
structure;  that  in  every  society  that  has  ap- 
peared   in    history,    the   manner    in    which 

■  wealth    is    distributed   and   society   divided 

■  into   classes   or  orders,   is   dependent  upon 
'.  what  is  produced,  how  it  is  produced,  and 

v.  J  how   the   products   are   exchanged.      From 
^  this  point  of  view  the  final  causes  of  all 
social  _c]ianges_ and  political  revolutions  are 
to  be  sought,  not  in  men's  brains,  not  in 
,  man's  better  insight  into  eternal  truth  and 
justice,  but  in  changes  in  the  modes  of  pro- 
.   duction    and    exchange.      They    are   to    be 
sought,   not  in  the  philosophy,  but  in   the 
(    economics  of  each   particular  epoch.     The 
growing  perception  that  existing  social  in- 
stitutions are  unreasonable  and  unjust,  that 


UTOPIAN    AND    SCIENTIFIC  95 

reason  has  become  unreason,  and  right 
wrong,  is  only  proof  that  in  the  modes  of 
production  and  exchange  changes  have 
silently  taken  place,  with  which  the  social 
order,  adapted  to  earlier  economic  condi- 
tions, is  no  longer  in  keeping.  From  this 
it  also  follows  that  the  means  of  getting 
rid  of  the  incongruities  that  have  been 
brought  to  light,  must  also  be  present,  in 
a  more  or  less  developed  condition,  within 
the  changed  modes  of  production  them- 
selves. These  means  are  not  to  be  invented 
by  deduction  from  fundamental  principles, 
but  are  to  be  discovered  in  the  stubborn 
facts  of  the  existing  system  of  production. 

What  is,  then,  the  position  of  modern 
Socialism  iri  this  connection? 

The  present  structure  of  society  —  this  is 
now  pretty  generally  conceded  —  is  the  cre- 
ation of  the  ruling  class  of  to-day,  of  the 
bourgeoisie.  The  mode  of  production  pecul- 
iar to  the  bourgeoisie,  known,  since  Marx, 
as  the  capitalist  mode  of  production,  was 
incompatible  with  the  feudal  system,  with 
the  privileges  it  conferred  upon  individuals, 
entire  social   ranks  and  local  corporations, 


96  SOCIALISM 

as  well  as  with  the  hereditary  ties  of  sub- 
ordination which  constituted  the  framework 
of  its  social  organization.  The  bourgeoisie 
broke  up  the  feudal  system  and  built  upon 
its  ruins  the  capitalist  order  of  society,  the 
kingdom  of  free  competition,  of  personal 
liberty,  of  the  equality,  before  the  law,  of 
all  commodity  owners,  of  all  the  rest  of  the 
capitalist  blessings.  Thenceforward  the 
capitalist  mode  of  production  could  develop 
in  freedom.  Since  steam,  machinery,  and 
the  making  of  machines  by  machinery  trans- 
formed the  older  manufacture  into  modern 
industry,  the  productive  forces  evolved 
under  the  guidance  of  the  bourgeoisie  de- 
veloped with  a  rapidity  and  in  a  degree 
unheard  of  before.  But  just  as  the  older 
manufacture,  in  its  time,  and  handicraft, 
becoming  more  developed  under  its  influ- 
ence, had  come  into  collision  with  the  feudaF 
trammels  of  the  guilds,  so  now  modern  in-' 
dustry,  in  its  more  complete  development, 
comes  into  collision  with  the  bounds  wTtTiTn' 
which  the  capitalistic  mode  of  production 
holds  it  confined.  The  new  productive 
forces  have  already  outgrown  the  capital- 


UTOPIAN    AND    SCIENTIFIC  97 

istic  mode  of  using  thcni.  And  this  conflict 
between  productive  forces  and  modes  of  pro- 
duction is  not  a  conflict  engendered  in  the 
mind  of  man,  hke  that  between  original 
sin  and  divine  justice.  It  exists,  in  fact, 
objectively,  outside  us,  independently  of  the 
will  and  actions  even  of  the  men  that  have 
brought  it  on.  Modern  Socialism  is  noth- 
ing but  the  reflex,  in  thought,  of  this  con- 
flict in  fact ;  its  ideal  reflection  in  the  minds, 
iirst,  of  the  class  directly  suffering  under  it, 
the  working-class. 

Now,  in  what  does  this  conflict  consist? 

Before  capitalistic  production,  i.  c,  in  t4ie 
Middle  Ages,  the  system  of  petty  industry 
»btained  generally,  based  upon  the  private 
property  of  the  laborers  in  their  means  of 
production;  in  the  country,  the  agriculture 
of  the  small  peasant,  freeman  or  serf;  in 
the  towns,  the  handicrafts  organized  in 
guilds.  The  instruments  of  labor  —  land, 
agricultural  implements,  the  workshop,  the 
tool  —  were  the  instruments  of  labor  of 
single  individuals,  adapted  for  the  use  of 
one  worker,  and,  therefore,  of  necessity, 
small,    dwarfish,    circumscribed.      But,    for 


98  SOCIALISM 

this  very  reason  they  belonged,  as  a  rule,  to 
the  producer  himself.  To  concentrate  these 
scattered,  limited  means  of  production,  to 
enlarge  them,  to  turn  them  into  the  power- 
ful levers  of  production  of  the  present  day 
—  this  was  precisely  the  historic  role  of 
capitalist  production  and  of  its  upholder, 
the  bourgeoisie.  In  the  fourth  section  of 
"  Capital "  Marx  has  explained  in  detail, 
how  since  the  fifteenth  century  this  has 
been  historically  worked  out  through  the 
three  phases  of  simple  co-operation,  manu- 
facture, and  modern  industry.  But  the 
bourgeoisie,  as  is  also  shown  there,  could 
not  transform  these  puny  means  of  pro- 
duction into  mighty  productive  forces,  with- 
out transforming  them,  at  the  same  time, 
from  means  of  production  of  the  individual 
into  social  means  of  production  only  worka- 
ble by  a  collectivity  of  men.  The  spinning- 
wheel,  the  handloom,  the  blacksmith's  ham- 
mer, were  replaced  by  the  spinning-machine, 
the  power-loom,  the  steam-hammer;  the 
individual  workshop,  by  the  factory  imply- 
ing the  co-operation  of  hundreds  and  thou- 
sands of  workmen.     In  like  manner,  pro- 


UTOPIAN    AND    SCIENTIFIC  99 

auction  itself  changed  from  a  series  of  in- 
dividual into  a  series  of  social  acts,  and 
the  products  from  individual  to  social  prod- 
ucts. The  yarn,  the  cloth,  the  metal 
articles  that  now  came  out  of  the  factory- 
were  the  joint  product  of  many  workers 
through  whose  hands  they  had  successively 
to  pass  before  they  were  ready.  No  one 
person  could  say  of  them :  "  I  made  that ; 
this  is  my  product." 

But  where,  in  a  given  society,  the  funda- 
mental form  of  production  is  that  spon- 
taneous division  of  labor  which  creeps  in 
gradually  and  not  upon  any  preconceived 
plan,  there  the  products  take  on  the  form  of 
commodities,  whose  mutual  exchange,  buy- 
'fng  and  selling,  enable  the  individual  pro- 
ducers to  satisfy  their  manifold  wants. 
And  this  was  the  case  in  the  Middle  Ages. 
The  peasant,  e.  g.,  sold  to  the  artisan  agri- 
cultural products  and  bought  from  him  the 
products  of  handicraft.  Into  this  society 
of  individual  producers,  of  commodity-pro- 
ducers, the  new  mode  of  production  thrust 
itself.  In  the  midst  of  the  old  division  of 
labor,   grown  up  spontaneously   and  upon 


100  SOCIALISM 

no  definite  plan,  which  had  governed,  the 
whole  of  society,  now  arose  division  of 
labor  upon  a  definite  plan,  as  organized  in 
the  factory;  side  by  side  with  individual 
production  appeared  social  production.  The 
products  of  both  were  sold  in  the  same 
market,  and,  therefore,  at  prices  at  least 
approximately  equal.  But  organization 
upon  a  definite  plan  was  stronger  than 
spontaneous  division  of  labor.  The  fac- 
tories working  with  the  combined  social 
forces  of  a  collectivity  of  individuals  pro- 
duced their  commodities  far  more  cheaply 
than  the  individual  small  producers.  Indi- 
vidual production  succumbed  in  one  de- 
partment after  another.  Socialized  produc-\ 
tion  revolutionized  all  the  old  methods  of) 
production.  But  its  revolutionary  character/ 
was,  at  the  same  time,  so  little  recognized, 
that  it  was,  on  the  contrary,  introduced  as 
a  means  of  increasing  and  developing  the 
production  of  commodities.  When  it  arose, 
it  found  ready-made,  and  made  liberal  use 
of.  certain  machinery  for  the  production 
and  exchange  of  commodities ;  merchants' 
capital,  handicraft,  wage-labor.     Socialized 


UTOPIAN    AND    SCIENTIFIC  lOI 

production  thus  introducinrj  itself  as  a  new 
form  of  the  production  of  commodities,  it 
was  a  matter  of  course  that  under  it  the  old 
forms  of  appropriation  remained  in  full 
swing,  and  were  applied  to  its  products  as 
well. 

In  the  medireval  stage  of  evolution  of  the 
production  of  commodities,  the  question  as 
to  the  owner  of  the  product  of  labor  could 
not  arise.  The  individual  producer,  as  a 
rule,  had,  from  raw  material  belonging  to 
himself,  and  generally  his  own  handiwork, 
produced  it  with  his  own  tools,  by  the  labor 
of  his  own  hands  or  of  his  family.  There 
was  no  need  for  him  to  appropriate  the  new 
product.  It  belonged  wholly  to  him,  as  a 
matter  of  course.  His  property  in  the  prod- 
uct was,  therefore,  based  upon  liis  oiini 
labor.  Even  where  external  help  was  used, 
this  was,  as  a  rule,  of  little  importance,  and 
very  generally  was  compensated  by  some- 
thing other  than  wages.  The  apprentices 
and  journeymen  of  the  guilds  w^orked  less 
for  board  and  wages  than  for  education,  in 
order  that  they  might  become  master  crafts- 
men themselves. 


I02  SOCIALISM 

Then  came  the  concentration  of  the 
means  of  production  and  of  the  producers 
in  large  workshops  and  manufactories,  their 
transformation  into  actual  socialized  means 
of  production  and  socialized  producers. 
But  the  socialized  producers  and  means  of 
production  and  their  products  were  still 
treated,  after  this  change,  just  as  they  had 
been  before,  i.  e.,  as  the  means  of  production 
and  the  products  of  individuals.  Hitlierto, 
the  owner  of  the  instruments  of  labor  had 
himself  appropriated  the  product,  because, 
as  a  rule,  it  was  his  own  product  and  the 
assistance  of  others  was  the  exception. 
Now  the  owner  of  the  instruments  of  labor 
always  appropriated  to  himself  the  product, 
although  it  was  no  longer  Jiis  product  but 
exclusively  the  product  of  the  labor  of 
others.  Thus,  the  products  now  produced 
socially  were  not  appropriated  by  those  who 
had  actually  set  in  motion  the  means  of  pro- 
duction and  actually  produced  the  commodi- 
ties, but  by  the  capitalists.  The  means  of 
production,  and  production  itself,  had  be- 
come in  essence  socialized.     But  they  were 


UTOPIAN    AND    SCIENTIFIC  IO3 

subjected  to  a  form  of  appropriation  which 
presupposes  the  private  production  of  indi- 
viduals, under  which,  therefore,  every  one 
owns  his  own  product  and  brings  it  to 
market.  The  mode  of  production  is  sub- 
jected to  this  form  of  appropriation,  al- 
though it  abolishes  the  conditions  upon 
which  the  latter  rests. ^ 

This  contradiction,  which  gives  to  the 
new  mode  of  production  its  capitalistic 
character,  contains  the  genn  of  the  whole 
of  the  social  antagonisms  of  to-day.  The 
greater  the  mastery  obtained  by  the  new 
mode  of  production  over  all  important  fields 
of  production  and  in  all  manufacturing 
countries,  the  more  it  reduced  individual 
production    to    an    insignificant    residuum, 

*  It  is  hardly  necessary  in  this  connection  to  point  out,  that, 
even  if  the  form  of  api)ropriation  remains  the  same,  the 
character  of  the  appropriation  is  just  as  much  revolutionized 
as  production  is  by  the  changes  described  above.  It  is,  of 
course,  a  very  different  matter  whether  I  appropriate  to  my- 
self my  own  product  or  that  of  another.  Note  in  passings 
that  wage-labor,  which  contains  the  whole  capitalistic  mode 
of  production  in  embryo,  is  very  ancient;  in  a  sporadic, 
scattered  form  it  existed  for  centuries  alongside  of  slave- 
labor.  But  the  embryo  could  duly  develop  into  the  capital- 
istic mode  of  production  only  when  the  necessary  historical 
preconditions  had  been    furnished. 


104  SOCIALISM 

the  more  clearly  was  brought  out  the  in- 
compatibility of  sociali::cd  production  ivith 
capitalistic  appropriation. 

The  first  capitalists  found,  as  we  have 
said,  alongside  of  other  forms  of  labor, 
wage-labor  ready-made  for  them  on  the 
market.  But  it  was  exceptional,  comple- 
mentary, accessory,  transitory  wage-labor. 
The  agricultural  laborer,  though,  upon  oc- 
casion, he  hired  himself  out  by  the  day,  had 
a  few  acres  of  his  own  land  on  which  he 
could  at  all  events  live  at  a  pinch.  The 
guilds  were  so  organized  that  the  journey- 
man of  to-day  became  the  master  of  to- 
morrow. But  all  this  changed,  as  soon  as 
the  means  of  production  became  socialized 
and  concenirated  in  the  hands  of  capitalists. 
I  The  means  of  production,  as  well  as  the 
product  of  the  individual  producer  became 
more  and  more  worthless;  there  was  noth- 
ing left  for  him  but  to  turn  wage-worker 
under  the  capitalist.  Wage-labor,  afore- 
time the  exception  and  accessory,  now  be- 
came the  rule  and  basis  of  all  production; 
aforetime  complementary,  it  now  became 
the  sole  remainine:  function  of  the  worker. 


UTOPIAN    AND    SCIENTIFIC  IO5 

The  wage-worker  for  a  time  became  a 
wage-worker  for  life.  The  number  of  these 
permanent  wage-workers  was  further  enor- 
mously increased  by  the  breaking-up  of  the 
feudal  system  that  occurred  at  tlie  same 
time,  by  the  disbanding  of  the  retainers  of 
the  feudal  lords,  the  eviction  of  the  peas- 
ants from  their  homesteads,  etc.  The  sepa- 
ration was  made  complete  between  the  means 
of  production  concentrated  in  the  hands  of 
the  capitalists  on  the  one  side,  and  the  pro- 
ducers, possessing  nothing  but  their  labor- 
power,  on  the  oth6r.  The  contradiction  be- 
tween socialized  production  ^and  capitalistic 
appropriation  manifested  itself  as  the  an- 
tagonism of  proletariat  and  bourgeoisie. 

We  have  seen  that  the  capitalistic  mode 
of  production  thrust  its  way  into  a  society 
cf  commodity-producers,  of  individual  pro- 
ducers, whose  social  bond  was  the  exchange 
of  their  products.  But  every  society,  based 
upon  the  production  of  commodities,  has 
this  peculiarity :  that  the  producers  have  lost 
control  over  their  own  social  inter-relations. 
Each  man  produces  for  himself  with  such 
means  of  production  as  he  may  happen  to 


I06  SOCIALISM 

have,  and  for  such  exchange  as  he  may  re- 
quire to  satisfy  his  remaining  wants.  No 
one  knows  how  much  of  his  particular 
article  is  coming  on  the  market,  nor  how 
much  of  it  will  be  wanted.  No  one  knows 
whether  his  individual  product  will  meet  an 
actual  demand,  whether  he  will  be  able  to 
make  good  his  cost  of  production  or  even 
to  sell  his  commodity  at  all.  Anarchy 
reigns  in  socialized  production. 

But  the  production  of  commodities,  like 
every  other  form  of  production,  has  its 
peculiar  inherent  laws  inseparable  from  it; 
and  these  laws  work,  despite  anarchy,  in 
and  through  anarchy.  They  reveal  them- 
selves in  the  only  persistent  form  of  social 
inter-relations,  i.  e.,  in  exchange,  and  here 
they  affect  the  individual  producers  as  com- 
pulsory laws  of  competition.  They  are,  at 
first,  unknown  to  these  producers  them- 
selves, and  have  to  be  discovered  by  them 
gradually  and  as  the  result  of  experience. 
They  work  themselves  out,  therefore,  inde- 
pendently of  the  producers,  and  in  antag- 
onism to  them,  as  inexorable  natural  laws 


UTOPIAN    AND    SCIENTIFIC  lO/ 

of  their  particular  form  of  production.  The 
product  governs  the  producers. 

In  mediaeval  society  especially  in  the  ear- 
lier centuries,  production  was  essentially 
directed  towards  satisfying  the  wants  of  the 
individual.  It  satisfied,  in  the  main,  only 
the  wants  of  the  producer  and  his  family. 
Where  relations  of  personal  dependence  ex- 
isted, as  in  the  country,  it  also  helped  to 
satisfy  the  wants  of  the  feudal  lord.  In 
all  this  there  was,  therefore,  no  exchange; 
the  products,  consequently,  did  not  assume 
the  character  of  commodities.  The  family 
of  the  peasant  produced  almost  everything 
they  wanted :  clothes  and  furniture,  as  well 
as  means  of  subsistence.  Only  when  it  be- 
gan to  produce  more  than  was  sufficient 
to  supply  its  own  wants  and  the  payments 
in  kind  to  the  feudal  lord,  only  then  did 
it  also  produce  commodities.  This  surplus, 
thrown  into  socialized  exchange  and  offered 
for  sale,  became  commodities. 

The  artisans  of  the  towns,  it  is  true,  had 
from  the  first  to  produce  for  exchange. 
But    they,    also,    themselves    supplied    the 


I08  SOCIALISM 

greatest  part  of  their  own  individual  wants. 
They  had  gardens  and  plots  of  land.  They 
turned  their  cattle  out  into  the  communal 
forest,  which,  also,  yielded  them  timber  and 
firing.  The  women  spun  flax,  wool,  and 
so  forth.  Production  for  the  purpose  of 
exchange,  production  of  commodities,  was 
only  in  its  infancy.  Hence,  exchange  was 
restricted,  the  market  narrow,  the  methods 
of  production  stable;  there  was  local  ex- 
clusiveness  without,  local  unity  within;  the 
mark  ^  in  the  country,  in  the  town,  the 
guild. 

But  with  the  extension  of  the  production 
of  commodities,  and  especially  with  the  in- 
troduction of  the  capitalist  mode  of  pro- 
duction, the  laws  of  commodity-production, 
hitherto  latent,  came  into  action  more  openly 
and  with  greater  force.  The  old  bonds 
were  loosened,  the  old  exclusive  limits 
broken  through,  the  producers  were  more 
and  more  turned  into  independent,  isolated 
producers  of  commodities.  It  became  ap- 
parent that  the  production  of  society  at 
large    was   ruled   by   absence   of   plan,    by 

*  See  Appendix. 


UTOPIAN    AND    SCIENTIFIC  IO9 

accident,  by  anarchy;  and  this  anarchy  grew 
to  greater  and  greater  height.  But  the  chief 
means  by  aid  of  which  the  capitalist  mode 
of  production  intensified  this  anarchy  of 
socialized  production,  was  the  exact  oppo- 
site of  anarchy.  It  was  the  increasing  organ- 
ization of  production,  upon  a  social  basis, 
in  every  individual  productive  establish- 
ment. By  this,  the  old,  peaceful,  stable 
condition  of  things  was  ended.  Wherever 
this  organization  of  production  was  intro- 
duced into  a  branch  of  industry,  it  brooked 
no  other  method  of  production  by  its  side. 
The  field  of  labor  became  a  battle-ground. 
The  great  geographical  discoveries,  and  the 
colonization  following  upon  them,  multi- 
plied markets  and  quickened  the  transfor- 
mation of  handicraft  into  manufacture.  The 
war  did  not  simply  break  out  between  the 
individual  producers  of  particular  localities. 
The  local  struggles  begat  in  their  turn  na- 
tional conflicts,  the  commercial  wars  of  the 
seventeenth  and  the  eighteenth  centuries. 

Finally,  modern  industry  and  the  opening 
of  the  world-market  made  the  struggle  uni- 
versal,   and   at   the   same   time  gave   it   an 


no  SOCIALISM 

unheard-of  virulence.  Advantages  in  nat- 
ural or  artificial  conditions  of  production 
now  decide  the  existence  or  non-existence 
of  individual  capitalists,  as  well  as  of  whole 
industries  and  countries.  He  that  falls  is 
remorselessly  cast  aside.  It  is  the  Dar- 
winian struggle  of  the  individual  for  ex- 
istence transferred  from  Nature  to  society 
with  intensified  violence.  The  conditions 
of  existence  natural  to  the  animal  appear 
as  the  final  term  of  human  development. 
The  contradiction  between  socialized  pro- 
duction and  capitalistic  appropriation  now 
presents  itself  as  an  antagonism  hctzuecn  the 
orgayiization  of  prodnction  in  the  individual 
workshop  and  the  anarchy  of  production  in 
society  generally. 

The  capitalistic  mode  of  production 
moves  in  these  two  forms  of  the  antagonism 
immanent  to  it  from  its  very  origin.  It  is 
never  able  to  get  out  of  that  "  vicious 
circle,"  which  Fourier  had  already  discov- 
ered. What  Fourier  could  not,  indeed, 
see  in  his  time  is,  that  this  circle  is  gradu- 
ally narrowing;  that  the  movement  becomes 
more  and  more  a  spiral,  and  must  come  to 


UTOPIAN    AND    SCIENTIFIC  III 

an  end,  like  the  movement  of  the  planets, 
by  collision  with  the  center.  It  is  the  com- 
pelling force  of  anarchy  in  the  production 
of  society  at  large  that  more  and  more  com- 
pletely turns  the  great  majority  of  men  into 
proletarians;  and  it  is  the  masses  of  the 
proletariat  again  who  will  finally  put  an 
end  to  anarchy  in  production.  It  is  the 
compelling  force  of  anarchy  in  social  pro- 
duction that  turns  the  limitless  perfectibility 
of  machinery  under  modern  industry  into 
a  compulsory  law  by  which  every  individual 
industrial  capitalist  must  perfect  his  machin- 
ery more  and  more,  under  penalty  of  ruin. 
But  the  perfecting  of  machinery  is  the 
making  human  labor  superfluous.  If  the 
introduction  and  increase  of  machinery 
means  the  displacement  of  millions  of  man- 
ual, by  a  few  machine-workers,  improve- 
ment in  machinery  means  the  displacement 
of  more  and  more  of  the  machine-workers 
themselves.  It  means,  in  the  last  instance, 
the  production  of  a  number  of  available 
wage-workers  in  excess  of  the  average  needs 
of  capital,  the  formation  of  a  complete  indus- 


112  SOCIALISM 

trial  reserve  army,  as  I  called  it  in  1845,' 
available  at  the  times  when  industry  is 
working  at  high  pressure,  to  be  cast  oui 
upon  the  street  when  the  inevitable  crash 
comes,  a  constant  dead  weight  upon  the 
limbs  of  the  working-class  in  its  struggle 
for  existence  with  capital,  a  regulator  for 
the  keeping  of  wages  down  to  the  low  level 
that  suits  the  interests  of  capital.  Thus 
it  comes  about,  to  quote  Marx,  that  ma- 
chinery becomes  the  most  powerful  weapon 
in  the  war  of  capital  against  the  working- 
class;  that  the  instruments  of  labor  con- 
stantly tear  the  means  of  subsistence  out 
of  the  hands  of  the  laborer;  that  the  very 
product  of  the  worker  is  turned  into  an 
instrument  for  his  subjugation.  Thus  it 
comes  about  that  the  economizing  of  the 
instruments  of  labor  becomes  at  the  same 
time,  from  the  outset,  the  most  reckless 
waste  of  labor-power,  and  robbery  based 
upon  the  normal  conditions  under  which 
labor  functions;  that  machinery,  "the  most 
powerful  instrument   for  shortening  labor- 

*   '  The  Condition  of  the  Working-Class  in  England  "   (Son 
nenschein  &  Co.).  p.  84. 


UTOPIAN    AND    SCIENTIF1«„ 

time,  becomes  the  most  unfailing  meai. 
for  placing  every  moment  of  the  laborer's 
time  and  that  of  his  family  at  the  disposal 
of  the  capitalist  for  the  purpose  of  expand- 
ing the  value  of  his  capital  "  ("  Capital," 
American  edition,  p.  445).  Thus  it  comes 
about  that  over-work  of  some  becomes  the 
preliminary  condition  for  the  idleness  of 
others,  and  that  modern  industry,  which 
hunts  after  new  consumers  over  the  whole 
world,  forces  the  consumption  of  the  masses 
at  home  down  to  a  starvation  minimum,  and 
in  doing  thus  destroys  its  own  home  market. 
"  The  law  that  always  equilibrates  the  rela- 
tive surplus  population,  or  industrial  re- 
serve army,  to  the  extent  and  energy  of 
accumulation,  this  law  rivets  the  laborer 
to  capital  more  firmly  than  the  wedges  of 
Vulcan  did  Prometheus  to  the  rock.  It 
establishes  an  accumulation  of  misery,  cor- 
responding with  accumulation  of  capital. 
Accumulation  of  wealth  at  one  pole  is, 
therefore,  at  the  same  time,  accumulation  of 
misery,  agony  of  toil,  slavery,  ignorance, 
brutality,  mental  degradation,  at  the  oppo- 
site pole,  i.  e.,  on  the  side  of  the  class  that 


SOCIALISM 

.oduces  its  own  product  in  the  form  of 
capital."  (Marx'  "Capital"  Vol.  I  [Kerr 
&  Co.],  p.  709.)  And  to  expect  any  other 
division  of  the  products  from  the  capitalistic 
mode  of  production  is  the  same  as  expecting 
the  electrodes  of  a  battery  not  to  decompose 
acidulated  water,  not  to  liberate  oxygen  at 
the  positive,  hydrogen  at  the  negative  pole, 
so  long  as  they  are  connected  with  the  bat- 
tery. 

We  have  seen  that  the  ever-increasing 
perfectibility  of  modern  machinery  is,  by 
the  anarchy  of  social  production,  turned 
into  a  compulsory  law  that  forces  the  in- 
dividual industrial  capitalist  always  to  im- 
prove his  machinery  always  to  increase 
its  productive  force.  The  bare  possibil- 
ity of  extending  the  field  of  production 
is  transformed  for  him  into  a  similar 
compulsory  law.  The  enormous  expan- 
sive force  of  modern  industry,  compared 
with  which  that  of  gases  is  mere  child's 
play,  appears  to  us  now  as  a  necessity 
for  expansion,  both  qualitative  and  quanti- 
tative, that  laughs  at  all  resistance.  Such 
resistance   is   offered   by   consumption,   by 


UTOPIAN    AND    SCIENTIFIC  11$ 

sales,  by  the  markets  for  the  products  of 
modern  industry.  But  the  capacity  for  ex- 
tension, extensive  and  intensive,  of  the 
markets  is  primarily  governed  by  quite  dif- 
ferent laws,  that  work  much  less  energet- 
ically. The  extension  of  the  markets  can 
not  keep  pace  with  the  extension  of  produc- 
tion. The  collision  becomes  inevitable,  and 
as  this  cannot  produce  any  real  solution 
so  long  as  it  does  not  break  in  pieces  the 
capitalist  mode  of  production,  the  collisions 
become  periodic.  Capitalist  production  has 
begotten  another  "  vicious  circle." 

As  a  matter  of  fact,  since  1825,  when  the 
first  general  crisis  broke  out,  the  whole 
industrial  and  commercial  world,  produc- 
tion and  exchange  among  all  civilized  peo- 
ples and  their  more  or  less  barbaric  hangers- 
on,  are  thrown  out  of  joint  about  once 
every  ten  years.  Commerce  is  at  a  stand- 
still, the  markets  are  glutted,  products  ac- 
cumulate, as  multitudinous  as  they  are  un- 
saleable, hard  cash  disappears,  credit  van- 
ishes, factories  are  closed,  the  mass  of  the 
workers  are  in  want  of  the  means  of  sub- 
sistence,   because   they   have   produced   too 


Tl6  SOCIALISM 

much  of  the  means  of  subsistence ;  bank- 
ruptcy follows  upon  bankruptcy,  execution 
upon  execution.  The  stagnation  lasts  for 
years;  productive  forces  and  products  are 
wasted  and  destroyed  wholesale,  until  the 
accumulated  mass  of  commodities  finally 
filter  off,  more  or  less  depreciated  in  value, 
until  production  and  exchange  gradually 
begin  to  move  again.  Little  by  little  the 
pace  quickens.  It  becomes  a  trot.  The  in- 
dustrial trot  breaks  into  a  canter,  the  canter 
in  turn  grows  into  the  headlong  gallop  of 
a  perfect  steeplechase  of  industry,  commer- 
cial credit,  and  speculation,  which  finally, 
after  breakneck  leaps,  ends  where  it  began 
■ —  in  the  ditch  of  a  crisis.  And  so  over 
and  over  again.  We  have  now,  since  the 
year  1825,  gone  through  this  five  times,  and 
at  the  present  moment  (1877)  we  are  going 
through  it  for  the  sixth  time.  And  the 
character  of  these  crises  is  so  clearly  defined 
that  Fourier  hit  all  of  them  off,  when  he 
described  the  first  as  "  crise  plcthoriqite," 
a  crisis  from  plethora. 

In  these  crises,  the  contradiction  between 
socialized  production  and  capitalist  appro- 


UTOPIAN    AND    SCIENTIFIC  11/ 

priation  ends  in  a  violent  explosion.  The 
circulation  of  commodities  is,  for  the  time 
being,  stopped.  Money,  the  means  of  cir- 
culation, becomes  a  hindrance  to  circulation. 
All  the  laws  of  production  and  circulation 
of  commodities  are  turned  upside  down. 
The  economic  collision  has  reached  its  apo- 
gee. The  mode  of  production  is  in  rebellion 
against  the- mode  of  exchange. 

The  fact  that  the  socialized  organization 
of  production  within  the  factory  has  devel- 
oped so  far  that  it  has  become  incompatible 
with  the  anarchy  of  production  in  society, 
which  exists  side  by  side  with  and  dom- 
inates it,  is  brought  home  to  the  capitalists 
themselves  by  the  violent  concentration  of 
capital  that  occurs  during  crises,  through 
the  ruin  of  many  large,  and  a  still  greater 
number  of  small,  capitalists.  The  whole 
mechanism  of  the  capitalist  mode  of  pro- 
duction breaks  down  under  the  pressure 
of  the  productive  forces,  its  own  creations. 
It_is  no  longer  able  to  turn  all  this  mass 
of  means  of  production  into  capital.  They 
lie  fallow,  and  for  that  very  reason  the 
industrial   reserve  army  must  also  lie  fal- 


Il8  SOCIALISM 

low.  Means  of  production,  means  of  sub- 
sistence, available  laborers,  all  the  elements 
of  production  and  of  general  wealth,  are 
present  in  abundance.  But  ^^abJmdance  bej^ 
comes  the  source  of  distress  and  want 'J 
(Fourier),  because  it  is  Jhe  I'^i:^!!!]!!!!^  that 
prevents  the  transforma_tion  of  the  mcans_ 
of  production  and  subsistence  into  capital. 
For  in  capitalistic  society  the  means  of  pro- 
duction can  only  function  when  they  have 
undergone  a  preliminary  transformation 
into  capital,  into  the  means  of  exploiting 
human  labor-power.  The  necessity  of  this 
transformation  into  capital  of  Uie  means  of 
production  and  subsistence  stands  like  a 
ghost  between  these  and  the  workers.  It 
alone  prevents  the  coming  together  of  the 
material  and  personal  levers  of  production; 
it  alone  forbids  the  means  of  production  to 
function,  the  workers  to  work  and  live. 
On  the  one  hand,  therefore,  the  capitalistic 
mode  of  production  stands  convicted  of  its 
own  incapacity  to  further  direct  these  pro- 
ductive forces.  On  the  other,  these  pro- 
ductive forces  themselves,  .jvvith.inci:€-asing 
energy,  press  forward  to  the  removal  of  the 


UTOPIAN    AND   SCIENTIFIC  II9 

existing  contradiction,  to  the  abolition  of 
their  quality  as  capital,  to  the  practical  rec- 
ognition of  their  character  as  social  pro- 
ductive forces. 

This  rebellion  of  the  productive  forces, 
as  they  grow  more  and  more  powerful, 
against  their  quality  as  capital  this  stronger 
and  stronger  command  that  their  social 
character  shall  be  recognized,  forces  the 
capitalist  class  itself  to  treat  them  more  and 
more  as  social  productive  forces,  so  far 
as  this  is  possible  under  capitalist  condi- 
tions. The  period  of  industrial  high  pres- 
sure, with  its  unbounded  inflation  of  credit, 
not  less  than  the  crash  itself,  by  the  collapse 
of  great  capitalist  establishments,  tends  to 
bring  about  that  form  of  the  socialization 
of  great  masses  of  means  of  production, 
which  we  meet  with  in  the  different  kinds  of 
joint-stock  companies.  Many  of  these 
means  of  production  and  of  distribution  are, 
from  the  outset,  so  colossal,  that,  like  the 
railroads,  they  exclude  all  other  forms  of 
capitalistic  exploitation.  At  a  further  stage 
of  evolution  this  form  also  becomes  insuffi- 
cient.    The  producers  on  a  large  scale  in  a 


I20  SOCIALISM 

particular  branch  of  industry  in  a  particular 
country  unite  in  a  "  Trust,"  a  union  for  the 
purpose  of  regulating  production.  They 
determine  the  total  amount  to  be  produced, 
parcel  it  out  among  themselves,  and  thus 
enforce  the  selling  price  fixed  beforehand. 
But  trusts  of  this  kind,  as  soon  as  business 
becomes  bad,  are  generally  liable  to  break 
up,  and,  on  this  very  account,  compel  a 
yet  greater  concentration  of  association. 
The  whole  of  the  particular  industry  is 
turned  into  one  gigantic  joint-stock  com- 
pany; internal  competition  gives  place  to 
the  internal  monopoly  of  this  one  company. 
This  has  happened  in  1890  with  the  English 
alkali  production,  which  is  now,  after  the 
fusion  of  48  large  works,  in  the  hands  of 
one  company,  conducted  upon  a  single  plan, 
and  with  a  capital  of  £6,000,000. 

In  the  trusts,  freedom  of  competition 
changes  into  its  very  opposite  —  into  monop- 
oly; and  the  production  without  any  def- 
inite plan  of  capitalistic  society  capitulates 
to  the  production  upon  a  definite  plan  of 
the  invading  socialistic  society.  Certainly 
this  is  so   far  still  to  the  benefit  and  ad- 


UTOPIAN    AND    SCIENTIFIC  121 

vantage  of  the  capitalists.  But  in  this  case 
the  exploitation  is  so  palpable  that  it  must 
break  down.  No  nation  will  put  up  with 
production  conducted  by  trusts,  with  so 
barefaced  an  exploitation  of  the  community 
by  a  small  band  of  dividend-mongers. 

In  any  case,  with  trusts  or  without,  the 
official  representative  of  capitalist  society 
—  the  State  —  will  ultimately  have  to 
undertake  the  direction  of  production.^ 
This  necessity  for  conversion  into  State- 
property  is  felt  first  in  the  great  institutions 
for  intercourse  and  communication  —  the 
postoffice,  the  telegraphs,  the  railways. 

If  the  crisis  demonstrate  the  incapacity  of 
the   bourgeoisie    for   managing  any   longer 

*  I  say  "  have  to."  For  only  when  the  means  of  produc- 
tion and  distribution  have  actually  outgrown  the  form  of 
management  by  joint-stock  companies,  and  when,  therefore, 
the  taking  them  over  by  the  State  has  become  economically 
inevitable,  only  then  —  even  if  it  is  the  State  of  to-day  that 
effects  this  —  is  there  an  economic  advance,  the  attainment  of 
another  step  preliminary  to  the  taking  over  of  all  productive 
forces  by  society  itself.  But  of  late,  since  Bismarck  went  in 
for  State-ownership  of  industrial  establishments,  a  kind  of 
spurious  SocialisTn,  has  arisen,  degenerating,  now  and  again, 
into  something  of  flunkeyism,  that  without  more  ado  declares 
all  State-ownership,  even  of  the  Bismarckian  sort,  to  be 
socialistic.  Certainly,  if  the  taking  over  by  the  State  of  the 
tobacco  industry  is  socialistic,  then  Napoleon  and  Metternich 
must  be  numbered  among  the  founders  of  Socialism.     If  the 


122  SOCIALISM 

modern  productive  forces,  the  transforma- 
tion of  the  great  estabHshments  for  produc- 
tion and  distribution  into  joint-stock  com- 
panies, trusts,  and  State  property,  show 
how  unnecessary  the  bourgeoisie  are  for 
that  purpose.     All   the  social   functions  of 

y  the  capitalist  are  now  performed  by  salaried 
employees.  The  capitalist  has  no  further 
social  function  than  that  of  pocketing  divi- 
dends, tearing  off  coupons,  and  gambling 
on  the  Stock  Exchange,  where  the  different 
capitalists  despoil  one  another  of  their  capi- 
tal. At  first  the  capitalistic  mode  of  pro- 
duction  forces   out   the   workers.     Now   it 

((  forces  out  the  capitalists,  and  reduces  them, 
just  as  it  reduced  the  workers,  to  the  ranks 
of  the  surplus  population,  although  not  im- 

Belgian  State,  for  quite  ordinary  political  and  financial  rea- 
sons, itself  constructed  its  chief  railway  lines;  if  Bismarck, 
not  under  any  economic  compulsion,  took  over  for  the  State 
the  chief  Prussian  lines,  simply  to  be  the  better  able  to 
have  them  in  hand  in  case  of  war,  to  bring  up  the  railway 
employees  as  voting  cattle  for  the  Government,  and  espe- 
cially to  create  for  himself  a  new  source  of  income  inde- 
pendent of  parliamentary  votes  —  this  was,  in  no  sense,  a 
socialistic  measure,  directly  or  indirectly,  consciously  or  un- 
consciously. Otherwise,  the  Royal  Maritime  Comiiany,  the 
Royal  porcelain  manufacture,  and  even  the  regimental  tailor 
of  the  army  would  also  be  socialistic  institutions,  or  even, 
as  was  seriously  proposed  by  a  sly  dog  in  Frederick  Williani 
III.'s   reign,  the  taking  over  by   the   State  of  the  brothels. 


UTOPIAN    AND    SCIENTIFIC  I23 

mediately  into  those  of  the  industrial  reserve 
army. 

But  the  transformation,  either  into  joint- 
stock  companies  and  trusts,  or  into  State- 
ownership  does  not  do  away  with  the  capi- 
talistic nature  of  the  productive  forces.  In 
the  joint-stock  companies  and  trusts  this  is 
obvious.  And  the  modern  State,  again,  is 
only  the  organization  that  bourgeois  society 
takes  on  in  order  to  support  the  external 
conditions  of  the  capitalist  mode  of  pro- 
duction against  the  encroachments,  as  well 
of  the  workers  as  of  individual  capitalists. 
The  modern  State,  no  matter  what  its  form, 
is  essentially  a  capitalist  machine,  the  state 
of  the  capitalists,  the  ideal  personification 
of  the  total  national  capital.  The  more  it 
proceeds  to  the  taking  over  of  productive 
forces,  the  more  does  it  actually  become  the 
national  capitalist,  the  more  citizens  docs  it 
exploit.  The  workers  remain  wage-work- 
ers —  proletarians.  The  capitalist  relation 
is  not  done  away  with.  It  is  rather  brought 
to  a  head.  But,  brought  to  a  head,  it  top- 
ples over.  State-ovvnership  of  the  produc- 
tive forces  is  not  the  solution  of  the  conflict/ 


124  SOCIALISM 

but  concealed  within  it  are  the  technical 
conditions  that  form  the  elements  of  that 
solution. 

This  solution  can  only  consist  in  the  prac- 
tical recognition  of  the  social  nature  of  the 
modern  forces  of  production,  and  there- 
fore in  the  harmonizing  the  modes  of  pro- 
duction, appropriation,  and  exchange  with 
the  socialized  character  of  the  means  of 
production.  And  this  can  only  come  about 
by  society  openly  and  directly  taking  pos- 
session of  the  productive  forces  which  have 
outgrown  all  control  except  that  of  society 
as  a  whole.  The  social  character  of  the 
means  of  production  and  of  the  products  to- 
day reacts  against  the  producers,  period- 
ically disrupts  all  production  and  exchange, 
acts  only  like  a  law  of  Nature  working 
blindly,  forcibly,  destructively.  But  with 
the  taking  over  by  society  of  the  produc- 
tive forces,  the  social  character  of  the  means 
of  production  and  of  the  products  will  be 
utilized  by  the  producers  with  a  perfect  un- 
derstanding of  its  nature,  and  instead  of  be- 
ing a  source  of  disturbance  and  periodical 


UTOPIAN    AND    SCIENTIFIC  I25 

collapse,  will  become  the  most  powerful 
lever  of  production  itself. 

Active  social  forces  work  exactly  like 
natural  forces;  blindly,  forcibly,  destruc- 
tively, so  long  as  we  do  not  understand,  and 
reckon  with,  them.  But  when  once  we  un- 
derstand them,  when  once  we  grasp  their 
action,  their  direction,  their  effects,  it  de- 
pends only  upon  ourselves  to  subject  them 
more  and  more  to  our  own  will,  and  by 
means  of  them  to  reach  our  own  ends.  And 
this  holds  quite  especially  of  the  mighty 
productive  forces  of  to-day.  As  long  as  we 
obstinately  refuse  to  understand  the  nature 
and  the  character  of  these  social  means  of 
action  —  and  this  understanding  goes 
against  the  grain  of  the  capitalist  mode  of 
production  and  its  defenders  —  so  long 
these  forces  are  at  work  in  spite  of  us,  in 
opposition  to  us,  so  long  they  master  us, 
as  we  have  shown  above  in  detail. 

But  when  once  their  nature  is  under- 
stood, they  can,  in  the  hands  of  the  pro- 
ducers working  together,  be  transformed 
from  master  demons  into  willing  servants. 


126  SOCIALISM 

The  difference  is  as  that  between  the  de- 
structive force  of  electricity  in  the  lightning 
of  the  storm,  and  electricity  under  command 
in  the  telegraph  and  the  voltaic  arc;  the  dif- 
ference between  a  conflagration,  and  fire 
working  in  the  service  of  man.  \\'ith  this 
recognition  at  last  of  the  real  nature  of  the 
productive  forces  of  to-day,  the  social  anar- 
chy of  production  gives  place  to  a  social 
regulation  of  production  upon  a  definite 
plan,  according  to  the  needs  of  the  com- 
munity and  of  each  individual.  Then  the 
capitalist  mode  of  appropriation,  in  which 
the  product  enslaves  first  the  producer  and 
then  the  appropriator,  is  replaced  by  the 
mode  of  appropriation  of  the  products  that 
is  based  upon  the  nature  of  the  modern 
means  of  production;  upon  the  one  hand, 
direct  social  appropriation,  as  means  to  the 
maintenance  and  extension  of  production  — 
on  the  other,  direct  individual  appropriation, 
as  means  of  subsistence  and  of  enjoyment. 
Whilst  the  capitalist  mode  of  production 
more  and  more  completely  transforms  the 
great  majority  of  the  population  into  prole- 
tarians, it  creates  the  power  which,  under 


UTOPIAN    AND    SCIENTIFIC  12/ 

penalty  of  its  own  destruction,  is  forced  to 
accomplish  this  revolution.  Whilst  it  forces 
on  more  and  more  the  transformation  of 
the  vast  means  of  production,  already  so- 
cialized, into  State  property,  it  shows  itself 
the  way  to  accomplishing  this  revolution. 
The  proletariat  seizes  political  pozuer  and 
turns  the  means  of  production  into  State 
property. 

/  But  in  doing  this,  it  abolishes  itself  as 
Xproletariat,  abolishes  all  class  distinctions 
and  class  antagonisms,  abolishes  also  the 
V  State  as  State.  Society  thus  far,  based 
upon  class  antagonisms,  had  need  of  the 
State.  That  is,  of  an  organization  of  the 
particular  class  which  was  pro  tempore  the 
exploiting  class,  an  organization  for  the  pur- 
pose of  preventing  any  interference  from 
without  with  the  existing  conditions  of  pro- 
duction, and  therefore,  especially,  for  the 
purpose  of  forcibly  keeping  the  exploited 
classes  in  the  condition  of  oppression  cor- 
responding with  the  given  mode  of  produc- 
tion (slavery,  serfdom,  wage-labor).  The 
State  was  the  official  representative  of  so- 
ciety as  a  whole;  the  gathering  of  it  together 


128  SOCIALISM 

into  a  visible  embodiment.  But  it  was  this 
only  in  so  far  as  it  was  the  State  of  that 
class  which  itself  represented,  for  the  time 
being,  society  as  a  whole;  in  ancient  times, 
the  State  of  slave-owning  citizens;  in  the 
middle  ages,  the  feudal  lords ;  in  our  own 
time,  the  bourgeoisie.  When  at  last  it  be- 
comes the  real  representative  of  the  whole 
of  society,  it  renders  itself  unnecessary.  As 
soon  as  there  is  no  longer  any  social  class 
to  be  held  in  subjection;  as  soon  as  class 
rule,  and  the  individual  struggle  for  exis- 
tence based  upon  our  present  anarchy  in 
production,  wüth  the  collisions  and  excesses 
arising  from  these,  are  removed,  nothing 
more  remains  to  be  repressed,  and  a  special 
repressive  force,  a  State,  is  no  longer 
necessary.  The  first  act  by  virtue  of  which 
the  State  really  constitutes  itself  the  repre- 
sentative of  the  whole  of  society  —  the  tak- 
ing possession  of  the  means  of  production 
in  the  name  of  society  —  this  is,  at  the  same 
time,  its  last  independent  act  as  a  StateT]/ 
State  interference  in  social  relations  be- 
comes, in  one  domain  after  another,  super- 
fluous, and  then  dies  out  of  itself;  the  gov- 


UTOPIAN    AND    SCIENTIFIC  I29 

ernment  of  persons  is  replaced  by  the  ad- 
ministration of  things,  and  by  the  conduct 
of  processes  of  production.  The  State  is 
not  "  abohshed."  It  dies  out.  \  This  gives 
the  measure  of  the  vahie  of  the  phrase  "  a 
free  State,"  both  as  to  its  justifiable  use  at 
times  by  agitators,  and  as  to  its  ultimate 
scientific  insufficiency;  and  also  of  the  de- 
mands of  the  so-called  anarchists  for  the 
abolition  of  the  State  out  of  hand. 

Since  the  historical  appearance  of  the 
capitalist  mode  of  production,  the  appropria- 
tion by  society  of  all  the  means  of  production 
has  often  been  dreamed  of,  more  or  less 
vaguely,  by  individuals,  as  well  as  by  sects, 
as  the  ideal  of  the  future.  But  it  could  be- 
come possible,  could  become  a  historical 
necessity,  only  when  the  actual  conditions 
for  its  realization  were  there.  Like  every 
other  social  advance,  it  becomes  practicable, 
not  by  men  understanding  that  the  existence 
of  classes  is  in  contradiction  to  justice, 
equality,  etc.,  not  by  the  mere  willingness 
to  abolish  these  classes,  but  by  virtue  of  cer- 
tain new  economic  conditions.  The  sepa- 
ration of  society  into  an  exploiting  and  an 


130  SOCIALISM 

exploited  class,  a  ruling  and  an  oppressed 
class,  was  the  necessary  consequence  of 
the  deficient  and  restricted  development  of 
production  in  former  times.  So  long  as  the 
total  social  labor  only  yields  a  produce  which 
but  slightly  exceeds  that  barely  necessary 
for  the  existence  of  all;  so  long,  therefore, 
as  labor  engages  all  or  almost  all  the  time 
of  the  great  majority  of  the  members  of 
society  —  so  long,  of  necessity,  this  society 
is  divided  into  classes.  Side  by  side  with 
the  great  majority,  exclusively  bond  slaves 
to  labor,  arises  a  class  freed  from  directly 
productive  labor,  which  looks  after  the  gen- 
eral affairs  of  society;  the  direction  of  labor, 
State  business,  law,  science,  art,  etc.  It  is, 
therefore,  the  law  of  division  of  labor  that 
lies  at  the  basis  of  the  division  into  classes. 
But  this  does  not  prevent  this  division  into 
classes  from  being  carried  out  by  means  of 
violence  and  robbery,  trickery  and  fraud. 
It  does  not  prevent  the  ruling  class,  once 
having  the  upper  hand,  from  consolidating 
its  power  at  the  expense  of  the  working- 
class,   from  turning  their  social  leadership 


UTOPIAN    AND    SCIENTIFIC  I3I 

into     an     intensified     exploitation     of     tke 
masses. 

But  if,  upon  this  showing,  division  into  '. 
classes  has  a  certain  Jiistorical  justification,  | 
it  has  this  only  for  a  given  period,  only 
under  given  social  conditions.  _^  It  was  based 
upon  tlie  insufficiency' of_j2^roduct^n.  I  It  will 
be  swept  away  by  the  complete  development 
of  modern  productive  forces.  And,  in  fact, 
the  abolition  of  classes  in  society  presup- 
poses a  degree  of  historical  evolution,  at 
which  the  existence,  not  simply  of  this  or 
that  particular  ruling  class,  but  of  any  rul-^ 
ing  class  at  all,  and,  therefore,  the  existence 
of  class  distinction  itself  has  become  an  ob- 
solete anachronism.  It  presupposes,  there- 
fore, the  development  of  production  carried 
out  to  a  degree  at  which  appropriation  of 
the  means  of  production  and  of  the  products, 
and,  with  this,  of  political  domination,  of 
the  monopoly  of  culture,  and  of  intellectual 
leadership  by  a  particular  class  of  society, 
has  become  not  only  superfluous,  but  eco- 
nomically, politically,  intellectually  a  hin- 
drance to  development. 


13:2  SOCIALISM 

This  point  is  now  reached.  Their  politi- 
cal and  intellectual  bankruptcy  is  scarcely 
any  longer  a  secret  to  the  bourgeoisie  them- 
selves. Their  economic  bankruptcy  recurs 
regularly  every  ten  years.  In  every  crisis, 
society  is  suffocated  beneath  the  weight  of 
its  own  productive  forces  and  products, 
which  it  cannot  use,  and  stands  helpless,  face 
to  face  with  the  absurd  contradiction  that 
the  producers  have  nothing  to  consume,  be- 
cause consumers  are  wanting.  ,  The  expan- 
sive force  of  tlie  means  of  production  bursts 
the  bonds  that  the  capitalist  modf:  of  produc- 
tion had  imposed  upon  them.  Their  deliv- 
erance from  these  bonds  is  the  one  precondi- 
tion for  an  unbroken,  constantly-accelerated 
development  of  the  productive  forces,  and 
therewith  for  a  practically  unlimited  in- 
crease of  production  itself.  Nor  is  this  all. 
The  socialized  appropriation  of  the  means 
of  production  does  away,  not  only  with  the 
present  artificial  restrictions  upon  produc- 
tion, but  also  with  the  positive  waste  and 
devastation  of  productive  forces  and  prod- 
ucts that  are  at  the  present  time  the  inevita- 
ble  concomitants   of   production,    and   that 


UTOPIAN    AND    SCIENTIFIC  1 33 

reach  their  height  in  the  crises.  Further,  it 
sets  free  for  the  community  at  large  a  mass 
of  means  of  production  and  of  products,  by 
doing  away  with  the  senseless  extravagance 
of  the  ruling  classes  of  to-day,"^nd  their  po- 
litical representatives.  The  possibility  of  se- 
curing for  every  member  of  society,  by 
means  of  socialized  production,  an  existence 
not  only  fully  sufficient  materially,  and  be- 
coming day  by  day  more  full,  but  an  exis- 
tence guaranteeing  to  all  the  free  develop- 
ment and  exercise  of  their  physical  and  men- 
tal faculties  —  this  possibility  is  now  for  the 
first  time  here,  but  ii  is  here} 

With  the  seizing  of  the  means  of  produc- 
tion by  society,  production  of  commodities 
is  done  away  with,  and,  simultaneously,  the 

^  A  few  figures  may  serve  to  give  an  approximate  idea  of 
the  enormous  expansive  force  of  the  modern  means  of  pro- 
duction, even  under  capitalist  pressure.  According  to  Mr. 
GifTen,  the  total  wealth  of  Great  Britain  and  Ireland 
amounted,  in  round  numbers,  in 

1814  to    £2,200,000,000. 

1865  to    £6,100,000,000. 

187s  to  £8,500,000,000. 
As  an  instance  of  the  squandering  of  means  of  production 
and  of  products  during  a  crisis,  the  total  loss  in  the  GcrmaD 
iron  industry  alone,  in  the  crisis  of  1873-78,  was  K'ven  at  the 
second  German  Industrial  Congress  (Berlin,  February  31, 
1878)   as    £22,750,000. 


134  SOCIALISM 

mastery  of  the  product  over  ibt  p: evliT.-ei 
Anarchy  in  social  production  is  replgce'l  by 
systematic,  definite  organization.  Tht 
struggle  for  individual  existence  disappears!!/ 
Then  for  the  first  tiriierman,'  in  a  certain 
sense,  is  finally  marked  off  from  the  rest  of 
the  animal  kingdom,  and  emerges  from  mere 
animal  conditions  of  existence  into  really 
human  ones.  The  whole  sphere  of  the  con- 
ditions of  life  which  environ  man,  and  which 
have  hitherto  ruled  man,  now  comes  under 
the  dominion  and  control  of  man,  who  for 
the  first  time  becomes  the  real,  conscious 
lord  of  Nature,  because  he  has  now  become 
S  master  of  his  own  social  organizationT^.  The 
laws  of  his  own  social  action,  hitherto 
standing  face  to  face  with  man  as  laws  of 
Nature  foreign  to,  and  dominating,  him, 
will  then  be  used  with  full  understanding, 
and  so  mastered  by  him.  Man's  own  social 
organization,  hitherto  confronting  him  as 
a  necessity  imposed  by  Nature  and  history, 
now  becomes  the  result  of  his  own  free  ac- 
tion. The  extraneous  objective  forces  that 
have  hitherto  governed  history,  pass  under 


UTOPIAN    AND    SCIENTIFIC  1 35 

the  control  of  man  himself.  Only  from  that 
time  will  man  himself,  more  and  more 
consciously,  make  his  own  history  —  only 
from  that  time  will  the  social  causes  set  in 
movement  by  him  have,  in  the  main  and  in 
a  constantly  growing  measure,  the  results 
intended  by  him.  It  is  the  ascent  of  man 
from  the  kingdom  of  necessity  to  the  king- 
dom of  freedom. 

Let  us  briefly  sum  up  our  sketch  of  his- 
torical evolution. 

I.  Medicuval    Society. —  Individual    pro- 
duction on  a  small  scale.     Means  of  pro-  v^ 
duction  adapted  foi-individual  use;  hence    • 
primitive,   ungainly,   petty,  dwarfed   in  ac- 
tion.    Production  for  immediate  consump-i 
tion,  either  of  the  producer  himself  or  of  j 
his  feudal  lord.     Only  where  an  excess  of 
production  over  this  consumption  occurs  is 
such  excess  offered  for  sale,  enters  into  ex^ 
change.     Production  of  commodities,  there- 
fore,  only  in   its   infancy.     But  already   it 
contains  within  itself,  in  embryo,  (warchy 
in  the  production  of  society  at  large. 


136  SOCIALISM 

IL  Capitalist  Revolution. —  Transforma- 
tion of  industry,  at  first  by  means  of  simple 
co-operation  and  manufacture.  Concentra- 
tion of  the  means  of  production,  hitherto 
scattered,  into  great  workshops.  As  a  con- 
sequence, their  transformation  from  individ- 
ual to  social  means  of  production  —  a  trans- 
formation which  does  not,  on  the  whole,  af- 
fect the  form  of  exchange.  The  old  forms 
of  appropriation  remain  in  force.  The  cap- 
italist appears.  In  his  capacity  as  owner  of 
the  means  of  production,  he  also  appropri- 
ates the  products  and  turns  them  into  com- 
modities. Production  has  become  a  social 
act.  Exchange  and  appropriation  continue 
to  be  individual  acts,  the  acts  of  individuals. 
TJie  social  product  is  appropriated  by  the 
individual  capitalist.  Fundamental  contra- 
diction, whence  arise  all  the  contradictions 
in  which  our  present  day  society  moves,  and 
which  modern  industry  brings  to  light. 

A.  Severance  of  the  producer  from  the 
means  of  production.  Condemnation  of  the 
worker  to  wage-labor  for  life.  Antagonism 
between  the  preletariat  and  the  bourgeoisie. 


UTOPIAN    AND    SCIENTIFIC  1 37 

B.  Growing  predominance  and  increasing 
effectiveness  of  the  laws  governing  the  pro- 
duction of  commodities.  Unbridled  compe- 
tition. Contradiction  betzveen  socialized  or- 
ganisation in  the  individual  factory  and  so- 
cial anarchy  in  production  as  a  zvhole. 

C.  On  the  one  hand,  perfecting  of  machin- 
ery, made  by  competition  compulsory  for 
each  individual  manufacturer,  and  comple- 
mented by  a  constantly  growing  displace- 
ment of  laborers.  Industrial  reserve-army. 
On  the  other  hand,  unlimited  extension  of 
production,  also  compulsory  under  compe- 
tition, for  every  manufacturer.  On  both 
sides,  unheard  of  development  of  productive 
forces,  excess  of  supply  over  demand,  over- 
production, glutting  of  the  markets,  crises 
every  ten  years,  the  vicious  circle :  excess 
here,  of  means  of  production  and  products 
• —  excess  there,  of  laborers,  without  employ- 
ment and  without  means  of  existence.  But 
these  two  levers  of  production  and  of  social 
well-being  are  unable  to  work  together,  be- 
cause the  capitalist  form  of  production 
prevents  the  productive  forces  from  working 


\ßS  SOCIALISM 

and   the  products  from  circulating,   unless 

ihey  ?.re  first  turned  into  capital  — -  which 

their   very   superabundance  prevents.     The 

contradiction  has  grown  into  an  absurdity. 

The  mode  of  production  rises  in  rebellion 

ragainst  tJie  form  of  exchange.     The  bour- 

-  geoisie  are  convicted  of  incapacity  further 

":  tc    manage    their    own    social    productive 

forces. 

D.  Partial  recognition  of  the  social  char- 
acter of  the  productive  forces  forced  "jpon  ; 
the  capitalists  themselves.  Taking  over  of  f 
the  great  institutions  for  production  and,  ^ 
communication,  first  by  joint-stock  companX  ^ 
ies,  later  on  by  trusts,  then  by  the  State.  \  < 
The  bourgeoisie  demonstrated  to  be  a  super-  1  , 
fluous  class.  All  its  social  functions  ar-g/. 
now  performed  by  salaried  employees.         / 

"^  III.  Proletarian  Revolution. —  Solution 
of  the  contradictions.  The  proletariat 
seizes  the  public  pow-er,  and  by  means  of 
this  transforms  the  socialized  means  of  pro- 
duction, slipping  from  the  hands  of  the  bour- 
(   geoisie,  into  public  property.     By  this  act, 


UTOPIAN    AND    SCIENTIFIC  1 39 

the  proletariat  frees  the  means  of  produc- 
tion from  the  character  of  capital  they  have 
thus  far  borne,  and  gives  their  socialized 
character  complete  freedom  to  work  itself 
out.  Socialized  production  upon  a  prede- 
termined plan  becomes  henceforth  possible. 
The  development  of  production  makes  the 
existence  of  different  classes  of  society 
thenceforth  an  anachronism.  In  proportion 
(^_asßxi3ir^-iyjn  social  production  vanishes,  the 
C  EPJitJcsi  authority  of  the  State  dies  out, 
Man,  at  last  the  master  of  his  own  form  of 
social  organization,  becomes  at  the  same 
time  the  loixl_over  Nature,  his  own  master 
—  free. 

To  accomplish  this  act  of  universal  eman- 
Icipation  is  the  historical  mission  of  the  mod- 
ern proletariat.     To  thoroughly  comprehend 
the  historical  conditions  and  thus  the  very 
nature  of  this  act,  to  impart  to  the  now  op- 
/ pressed  proletarian  class  a  full  knowledge 
of  the  conditions  and  of  the  meaning  of  the 
momentous  act  it  is  called  upon  to  accom- 
Iplish,  tliis  is  the  task  of  the  theoretical  ex- 
I  pression  of  tlie  proletarian  movement,  scien- 
'  tific  Socialism. 


ANCIENT  SOCIETY 

OR 

Researches  in  the  Lines  of  Human 

Progress:    From  Savagery 

Through  Barbarism  to 

Civilization 

One  American  and  only  one  is  recug- 
nized  by  the  universities  of  Europe  as 
one  of  the  world's  great  scientists.  That 
American  is  Lewis  H.  Morgan^  the  author 
of  this  book.  He  was  the  pioneer  writer 
on  the  subject.  His  conclusions  have  been 
fully  sustained  by  later  investigators. 

This  work  contains  a  full  and  clear  explanation 
of  many  vitally  important  facts,  without  which  no 
intelligent  discussion  of  the  "Woman  Question" 
is  possible.  It  shows  that  the  successive  marriaKa 
customs  that  have  arisen  have  corresponded  to 
certain  definite  industrial  conditions.  The  author 
shows  that  it  is  industrial  changes  that  alter  the 
relations  of  the  sexes,  and  that  these  changes  are 
still  going  on.  He  shows  the  historical  reason  for 
the  "double  standard  of  morals"  for  men  and 
women,  over  which  reformers  have  wailed  in  vain. 
And  he  points  the  way  to  a  cleaner,  freer,  happier 
life  for  women  in  the  future,  through  the  triumph 
of  the  working  class.  All  this  is  shown  indirectly 
through  historical  facts;  the  reader  is  left  to  draw 
his  own  conclusions. 

Cloth,  586  large  pages,  gold  stamping.  Until 
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